Title: Apparatus for making expanded metal lead-acid battery grids

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Abstract: Method and apparatus for making expanded lead grids for use in Faure-type lead-acid storage battery plates. The finished grid has a current-collecting header of unexpanded strip and a reticulated portion expanded, guillotine style, from the strip into a plurality of paste-retaining cells bounded by skeletal elements and nodes formed during expansion. The skeletal elements and nodes extend in opposite directions through paste from substantially one face of the plate to the other and the nodes are twisted and partially flattened so as to have plateaus on the nodes which lay in planes parallel to the principal planes of the pasted plate. A ribbon or strip of lead is fed into a continuous, in-line, guillotine-type, dual expansion machine and therein expanded along its longitudinal edges to form two reticulated portions and leaving a central unexpanded portion from which a grid, header and lug are subsequently formed. The strip leaving the expander has a V-shape or gull-winged configuration when viewed from its end, the wings of which are subsequently folded down by plow and roller means so as to be in substantially the same plane as the unexpanded portion. The reticulated portions are subsequently uniformly stretched in a direction perpendicular to the central portion by embossed forming rolls and mating counter rolls. Finally, the reticulated portion is rolled to twist and flatten the nodes joining skeletal elements. Water lubrication of the expanding dies promotes oxidation of the reticulated portion which in turn tends to enhance paste retention.


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