The design and manufacture of mass production equipment for a pencil with a seed

Abstract

Autosprout is the mass manufacturing equipment envisioned to produce Sprout, a pencil with a seed. This pencil concept was developed by MIT students a successful round of funding and first production run through Kickstarter. The goals for Autosprout are to fully automate the manufacturing process, and to reduce the manufacturing costs from eighty cents per pencil to less than thirty, while also producing a completely assembled pencil every five seconds. The original assembly process was slow and required a lot of manpower. However, it laid a foundation to design the automated process described in this thesis. The new system will feature two carousel systems. The first carousel will load the cedar pencil, cut a shoulder using a specially designed router, and finally add a dab of glue around the shoulder. The second carousel will load a pill capsule body and fill it with soil and two to three seeds. At the end of each carousel process the pill capsule and pencil will come together and the capsule will be placed onto the shoulder and the glue will hold it in place. Before the capsule is loaded into the carousel, it must be sorted and properly aligned. Models for a vibratory feeder were first designed and tested, but, due to the inconsistent performance of the models, an industrial vibratory feeder was purchased and modified. The modification consists of a chute leading to a vacuum system that removes the capsule from the feeder, rotates, and finally loads the capsule into the carousel by switching a valve making the vacuum into a stream of high air pressure. A similar system will be used for removing seeds from a hopper and placing them in the capsule.