Custom Conveyor Locks Brazing Paste Timing at 120 PPM Across 8 Ring Terminal Variants

A precision electrical terminal manufacturer came to Bellco with a request that pushed beyond standard parts feeding. Their line dispenses brazing paste — a precise dot of metal-filled compound — onto copper ring terminals as they travel toward a brazing furnace. The timing has to be exact: too early and the paste smears, too late and it misses the part entirely. The dispenser fires on a sensor signal, which means the part has to travel past that sensor at a precisely controlled velocity, every single time.

Standard bowl-to-track feeding couldn't deliver that consistency. Vibratory tracks rely on part-to-part contact and friction, which means the trailing parts always travel slightly slower than the leading ones. At 120 parts per minute — the speed the customer's brazing line required — that variance becomes the difference between a good braze and a rejected part.

Adding to the complexity: the system had to handle eight different ring terminal variants — different sizes, different barrel diameters, different overall lengths. Whatever Bellco built had to feed all eight without retooling, without recalibrating the paste dispenser, and without slowing down the line.

Bellco's answer was to take the parts out of the vibratory environment entirely once they reached the brazing zone. A 500mm vibratory bowl with polyurethane coating gently orients the copper terminals barrel-trailing and feeds them down a 355mm flat linear track. From there, the parts transition onto a fully custom dual-belt conveyor — designed and built entirely by the Bellco engineering team.

The conveyor is the engineering centerpiece. Two belts run in parallel along both sides of the part, gripping each terminal gently as it travels. Because the belts move at a fixed, motor-controlled velocity — not part-to-part friction — every terminal travels at exactly the same speed regardless of variant, regardless of part queue length. The customer's sensor and paste dispenser are mounted above the conveyor on a Bellco-built bracket with up, down, left, right and rotate adjustability, so the entire dispense zone can be dialed in for each part variant during commissioning.

Every component of the conveyor — bearings, belt tension, drive pulleys, side-rail geometry, transition from the vibratory track — was modeled in SolidWorks before fabrication. The complete 3D model was shared with the customer for approval prior to the build, so when the system arrived at their facility, the integration with their existing brazing line was already verified on paper.