Patent ID: 7658381

Claim:
A document processing system for feeding and transporting documents, the system comprising: a feeder stage including a hopper assembly and a feeder wherein the feeder acts to feed documents singly, in order, from a stack of documents in the hopper assembly; a transport stage downstream of the feeder stage for receiving the fed documents, the transport stage including a document track composed of a pair of opposing rigid track walls wherein, during transportation, the documents are moved along the document track in a series to allow operations to be performed on the documents; a retractable document handling mechanism cooperating with a portion of the document track and including a movable base member which carries one side of the document track and a fixed base member that carries the other side of the document track, the retractable document handling mechanism further including an assertable member and being arranged with respect to the document track such that assertion of the member causes retraction of the opposing track walls in the cooperating portion of the document track by retracting the movable base member, thereby providing access to the document track, the retraction being sufficient to provide a track opening sufficient to allow the operator to relieve document jams; and wherein the retraction motion of the movable base member is linear such that the opposed track walls remain aligned with each other during opening and closing of the document track to provide a repeatable precise closed position.