It was required to automate fitting valves into helium balloons as it is slow to do manually and often air is trapped in the balloon which makes them take up a lot of space when packed. It could have been automatically loaded but the customer preferred manual loading of the balloons due to 100% inspection being required and any faulty balloons can be rejected before the valve is fitted.

The balloon valves are loaded into the vibratory bowl feeder and automatically orientated to be the correct way around and then presented to the linear feeder which splits for the left and right hand balloon fitting.

Two balloons are loaded to have valves fitted at the same time to improve efficiency.