The first sorter I worked with was the 084 - 2000 cpm. We had the extended feed tray that would let us put up to 4000 cards in at a time. We got really good at picking up stacks of 3000-4000 cards and dropping them all on the tray while it was still running. But, when you had a 150,000 cards to sort, you didn't want to stop just to load more cards. We actually block sorted most of the time by sorting the high order column first and putting all the cards in the rack on the wall. That meant only sorting 1/10 of the cards at a time. 2000 cpm, though, made for some pretty bad card jams on occasion. The jams in the transports weren't really too bad. Crumpled cards that were usually easy to redo. But, jams at the feed throat were really bad. The cards were torn and mangled. It could take 1/2 an hour to clear and then replace. Then, we had to start the sort on those cards all over again. BTW, in your demo, as soon as you did the first sort on c/c 15, the cards would be completely out of order. 😊
I preferred the 085, but I have quite a few hours in front of an 082. Very useful machines in their day. I was taught to pull the cards out from the 9 bin first, working back to the right of the machine. It was slightly faster than starting from the reject bin end.
I am a retired IBM CE and I worked on them as little as possible because of card jams. Reject chute blade was the toughest to form. And yes I still have the 10/20 gauge and bending tool.
