Cylindrical rollers are never perfectly cylindrical. A common defect of a cylindrical roller is radial taper. A roller with a radial taper will induce a lateral shear force into the web. This shear force will cause a steering effect as well as a cross machine direction compressive stress which can lead to the formation of troughs and wrinkles in a web. This publication addresses these topics and presents a model to help determine the specification for taper in "cylindrical" rollers. An analytical model is presented, experiments were performed, and the data was compared to predictions from the proposed model.