Sorry to post something commercially self-serving ... I gain nothing personally from sales, outside of continued employment at my company which naturally needs income to survive and prosper.
For those machine design engineers, machinery builders and factory floor technicians who are flummoxed by web media which wander across the width of the machines they design, build and maintain (and which have to be intermittantly or constantly adjusted to compensate) my company has a very sweet patented solution which can be easily implemented in most applications. We call it simply a Compensating Roll, and it is actually a self-adjusting idler which reacts immediately (essentially no lag) to pressure differentials across its length (across the web width) by "wobbling" slightly ... really adjusting its axis of rotation such that the web seeks its own centered path. It is neither crowned (convex) nor bowed (concave), but rather is truly cylindrical, and it has been used mostly at around 350 RPM to 850 RPM (translating to approximately 500 to
1200 linear feet per minute) in the corrugated paperboard industry for a couple of decades now with great success. It can work at faster speeds (and slower) as well with some adjustment and across a great variety of lengths (web widths). It could also be the end of some companies' problems in other industries which handle webs, whether paper, plastic or other thin media. We just haven't marketed it for very much other than corrugated board manufacturing applications. That particular industry is pretty well saturated with this product by now -- almost everybody uses these things -- and I'm trying to help my company by introducing the product to other industries this way (Usenet).If you or someone you know works in a web handling industry, in whatever capacity, where web wander on handling machinery can be a problem please give us a call and let us know the specifics. We'll probably be able to come up with either an off-the-shelf solution or a very quickly customized solution to fix the problem permanently and economically. If you want to design your own Compensating Roll for a particular application I imagine the management would be happy also to talk about licensing. We're a small company and we can react quickly to inquiries.
Please see our Web site at
Thanks very much, Mark Stapleton Design Engineer Charlotte, North Carolina