| 摘要 |
An apparatus for producing frozen confections of the type including sticks projecting from a block of frozen confection material including a plurality of detachable mold strips and a screw conveyor arrangement for indexing the mold strips through a closed rectangular path in a horizontal plane with the mold cups of the mold strips opening upwardly. The conveyor includes cradles to which the mold strips are individually and pivotally mounted, a rectangular arrangement of tracks for guiding the cradles through the rectangular path of travel, and several conveyor screws which are driven continuously for propelling the cradles along the tracks. The conveyor screws have screw grooves therein adapted to cause the cradles to dwell under a confection filler, a stick inserter, a confection extractor and mold cleaning apparatus. Between the extractor and mold cleaning apparatus a photodetector unit is mounted to scan the row of mold cups of each strip as it is laterally transferred from the extracting lane to the filling lane, and a turn-over device that is responsive to the photodetector unit is provided to invert only those mold strips found to contain confection material that was not removed by the extractor. The confection material is then dislodged from the inverted cup by an air jet, and the inverted mold strip is returned to its original orientation with the cups depending from the strip so that confection material may subsequently be deposited therein. |
