The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
May. 31, 1994
Filed:
Apr. 30, 1993
Allan G Olson, Camas, WA (US);
James O Beehler, Brush Prairie, WA (US);
Hewlett-Packard Company, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Abstract
A sheet media realignment mechanism is described for use in, for example, a printer. Preferably, the mechanism includes a lever located in the sheet-feeding path adjacent and beneath a rotatable member that mounts a plurality of sheet-feeding rollers. At the beginning of a sheet-feeding cycle, the lever is urged from its extreme upstream pivotal orientation by a pivot-mounted strut into a downstream orientation in which a top sheet of the printer's infeed stack is fed by frictional forces into the feed zone. Upon release of the lever by the strut at a predefined pivotal orientation of the rotatable member, the lever is urged farther into an extreme downstream orientation by the sheet being advanced. After the sheet passes by, the lever is returned to its extreme upstream orientation in which it urges upstream and away from the printer's feed zone any sheets of the stack that inadvertently may have been dislodged and partly advanced downstream and toward the feed zone by frictional forces between the fed sheet and those beneath it. Thus, the lever realigns the sheets of the paper stack after each single-sheet feed into the printer or other sheet media-processing equipment to permit the addition of sheets to the top of the stack without pulling the stack away from the feed zone and to reduce the likelihood of undesirable multiple-sheet picks and feeds.