Excursus: The evolution of the SPRINT machine series dowel insertion tool.
The single-sided drilling and dowel inserting machine SPRINT, has a long tradition at KOCH and is constantly being developed to stay at the cutting edge of technology and to keep up with the changing requirements of customers.
An important part of the machine is the dowel tool. In this digression, we would like to give you a brief insight into some of the development stages it has gone through at KOCH:
Initially, a Patanoster dowel tool was installed in the machine. It has two internal holes through which the dowels are transported. Because there are two holes in the patanoster, one dowel is always available and can be pressed into the workpiece. With the SPRINT machine, a dowel is needed at very short intervals one after the other. This is also the reason why in the two following dowel tools the dowel singling is mounted directly on the unit. The distance from dowel separation to dowel insertion is thus kept very short.
Later, the development shifted to a more open system. It was now possible that dowel malfunctions can be removed more easily. In addition, the possibility now opened up to process dowels with a diameter of 6/8 mm or 8/10 mm and a dowel length of 30-60 mm with one dowel tool. With the Patanoster dowel tool, the customer had to decide on the dowel diameter and the dowel length in advance. This version of the dowel tool is still partly used today.
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This is the latest variant of the dowel tool for the SPRINT and was developed in the context of a complete revision of the SPRINT series. Functionally, it builds on the same basis as the previous dowel tool, but a more intelligent design saves material and assembly costs.