Development of In-Process Skew and Shift Adjusting Mechanism for Paper Handling

We have developed a new type of paper handling mechanism to adjust skew and shift which may cause paper jam. The developed mechanism is compact, highspeed, highly robust, and capable of in-process adjustment of large skew and shift. Until now, in order to adjust skew and shift in-process, the conventional adjusting mechanism is able to adjust either skew or shift and even if it is able to adjust both, it does not have sufficient reliability. To solve this problem, the proposed mechanism uses a ball-actuator as an adjusting mechanism. By clipping paper by two free rotating balls and controlling the ball rotation, the developed mechanism is able to control skew and shift of clipped paper. We estimated performance of the developed mechanism and concluded that it is possible to construct an adjusting mechanism to meet the skew and shift requirements.