In slitting wide webs, sheets or coils of metal, such as steel, into strips, the sheet is passed through a plurality of cutters to simultaneously produce a plurality of strips which are immediately rewound simultaneously as separate coils on a mandrel. Since the wide web or coil sheet often varies slightly in thickness, after slitting some of the coils, particularly those from the edges of the sheet, where the sheet is usually thinnest, will have their strips from the slitter sag with respect to the other strips and thereby will not be wound as tightly as they should be, or as required by the purchaser of the coiled strips. Thus, in order to insure that all of the slit webs are coiled simultaneously and tautly, one to two foot length spacers of cardboard or other fiberboard which have been precut to about the width of the slit webs or slightly less, are fed into the strip coils when they need them to take up any slack or sag.
Previously the operator of such a slitter had a stack of such precut fiberboard spacers beside him so that he could manually insert these spacers under the fast coiling strips that sagged more than others so that all the rewound coils of strips would be tight. Since these spacers are quickly and tenaciously grabbed between the tangential strip and its coil already on the mandrel, if the operator did not release the spacer immediately, his hand could be quickly pulled into the fast winding coil and serious injury occur. To avoid this, some operators tended to throw the spacers between the strip and its coil, but the accuracy of this was not as great as when the spacers were fed directly to the split web which needed them.
Some mechanical devices have been made for feeding these spacers into these strip coils, which devices are mounted on tracks transverse of the strips, and were manually positioned by the operator from the side of the strips. Such spacers were stored as a continuous strip in a coil and then were cut to length by the device for feeding into the slit web coil, making these devices quite complicated.
Another way of taking up the slack or sag in coils was to coat the sagging strip with a powdered material to increase their thickness.