Ink marker on bowls

THE SOLUTION PROVIDED BY LF TECHNOLOGIES

Our client is a large French manufacturer and decorator of traditional bowls with ears.

Main functions

Objective

Copy the human hand in the writing phase on the bowls, allowing for a very uniform and repeatable writing.

PROBLEMATIC ISSUES

The writing area on the bowls is not flat, so it is necessary to interpolate the up/down and forward/backward movements of the nib to ensure a uniform stroke of the characters;

This non-planar zone also implies a distortion of the characters.

Because the characters were previously hand-written, the font is not fully defined in the same way as on a word processor.
At the time of writing, the bowl does not yet have its protective enamel layer, and the material absorbs the ink to a greater or lesser extent depending on the ambient atmospheric conditions.

SOLUTION AND RESULT

The machine consists of shafts to move the nib, a shaft to rotate the bowl, a pump to feed ink to the nib, an ink storage tank and a control unit.

Operating principle :

On the programme, the user indicates the texts they wish to write and the associated quantities, then places a bowl on the dedicated support and starts writing.

The nib is positioned on the bowl and the ink is drawn from the jar and injected directly onto the bowl. The pump is a plunger piston, which ensures a constant flow during the character writing phase.

A potentiometer adjusts the ink flow rate instantaneously to ensure the best possible writing quality.

The bowl support rotates, and this rotation is interpolated with the movements of the feather.

When a bowl is finished, the user removes it from the stand, puts on a new one and starts writing the next bowl at the touch of a button.