Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/452

 436

��Popular Science Monthly

��At left: The three-wheeled vehicle with inclined screen, bucket conveyor and mechanical feeder

Below: The machine in operation. The feeder is suspended on a cable and adjusts itself to the pile

���Filling Twenty Coal Bags by Elec tricity in Four Minutes

ONE man and the coal -bagging ma- chine shown in the accompanying illustrations can fill and stack twenty bags in four minutes. In many cities with a large number of private residences without suitable driveways coal is delivered in bags. In such cases bagging the coal by hand has always been slow and expensive. To eliminate this cost the machine shown herewith was designed.

It consists of a small three-wheeled vehicle having an inclined screen, small bucket-conveyor and a mechanical feeder which automatically pushes the coal to the bottom of the elevator. The machine is chain-driven from a small electric motor beneath the conveyor, receiving its current from the available lines in the yard.

In operation, the ma chine is backed up into the base of the coal-pile, the feeder is lowered to the surface, a bag is placed on the bottom of the screen as shown, the current is turned on and the clutch is thrown in. After this the opera- tor has nothing to do but remove the filled bags and stack them. The feeder is suspended on counter- weigh ted cables so that it adjusts itself to the surface of the pile. It is provided with a metal hood to prevent clogging in case of a pile slide. Four removable screens are furnished.

���Put Pneumatic Tires on Your Hiking Shoes

TAKING his inspiration from auto- mobile tires, and going the ordinary rubber heel one better, Mr. Oscar Mussinan, of New York city, has invented a pneumatic tire for his own shoes. The "tire" diff"ers very decidedly from the ordinary heel in that a partition of rubber is built in it half way up its thickness. The partition thus forms an air chamber with the bottom of the leather above it, and still another one with the ground when the heel comes down upon it. Each of these two chambers is connectedwith theout- side air by a small open- ing. When the heel strikes the ground, the air in the chambers becomes slightly com- pressed causing the jolt of the walking to be very greatly cush- ioned in a manner very much similar to that in which the automobile tire cushions the jolts of riding. To pre- vent the air from be- coming too suddenly compressed and so putting the bottom of the heel out of shape, the air is allowed to escape slowly through the openings during these compressions.

��A rubber partition is built half way up into the heel. This forms an air cham- ber to cushion jolts

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