1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a cylinder cleaning device for cleaning a surface of a cylinder, such as a blanket cylinder of an offset printing machine, an impression cylinder, plate cylinder, or an ink roller. More particularly, the invention relates to a cylinder cleaning device in which the support and fabric insertion members form an assembly with an installed cleaning fabric made in a roll form, or folded in a pleated form (folded in zigzags), or a container holding the cleaning fabric supply element is located thereon.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, in a cylinder cleaning device for cleaning the surface of a cylinder, such as a blanket cylinder of an offset printing machine, using a cleaning fabric, the cleaning fabric is wrapped around a hollow core to form a cleaning fabric roll, into which a rigid shaft, usually made of metal, is inserted. This metal shaft in the cleaning unit functions as a rotation shaft. Such an arrangement has been widely used. As an improvement, a method of directly holding a core to make it a rotation shaft without using such a metal shaft has been proposed in, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. Hei 4-234659 Official Gazette.
However, when no metal shaft is used, the rigidness of the cleaning fabric roll is reduced, and the center of the roll deflects by forces applied to the cleaning fabric advancement means so that the cleaning cloth is not uniformly supplied. Thus, there is a danger that a roll will disengage the frame to which it is mounted and fall into the printing machine.
Since the outer diameter of the metal shaft and the dimension of the device used for directly mounting a core to the cleaning device differ in accordance with the kind of cleaning device, not every cleaning fabric roll can be used in every kind of cleaning device. Furthermore, attaching a cleaning fabric roll to the cleaning device, which involves inserting a heavy shaft of strong rigidity into the core, affixing the shaft and core together, and attaching them to the cleaning unit, is cumbersome.
Additionally, using a core rather than a metal shaft has the disadvantage of reducing the amount of space for winding the cleaning fabric thereon since the core wall thickness will increase. In an attempt to increase efficiency, the diameter of the core was reduced. The reduced diameter, however, resulted in a weakened core that could not be attached to the cleaning device with a conventional metal shaft.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a cylinder cleaning device in which the space efficiency for the cleaning fabric supply element is improved by making the roll core part extremely thin, or without using a roll core.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a cylinder cleaning device having a cleaning fabric attaching means which can attach cleaning fabric rolls of different kinds. It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a cylinder cleaning device having an attaching means which can attach cleaning fabric with roll cores of different diameters. It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a cylinder cleaning device having an attaching means which can attach cleaning fabric can easily to a cleaning device with less labor required. It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a cylinder cleaning device having an attaching means which can attach cleaning fabric and can be applied not only for the cleaning fabric in a roll form but also for the cleaning cloth folded in a pleated form, and in container holding form.