Patent Application
20090236955
A staple of any business or home office is the file cabinet and file drawer for storing important documents. File cabinets and file drawers typically include pairs of rails that extend from front to back at an upper portion of the drawer or cabinet and spaced twelve to fourteen inches apart, depending upon the size of the documents. Hanging file folders comprising a large sheet of material such as thin cardboard are folded in half to form a pocket or pouch for holding the documents in individual folders, and hung on the rails using opposed hook members on the upper surface of each half of the file folder. In this manner, many documents can be individually stored in separate hanging files for easy storage and retrieval.
One shortcoming of the above-described invention is that the hanging files themselves take up valuable space in the cabinet or drawer. Made of heavy cardboard, the file can take up more space than the document it is storing, reducing the amount of usable storage. Where there are many documents with only a few pages or less, the hanging files take up the majority of the space in the area intended for document storage. The hanging files, because they are made of folded material, tend to unfold and open up if the document is small, leading to a cluttered appearance of the file area. Moreover, documents with many pages do not fit well in the folders and can even protrude out of the folder. This also results in a cluttered file appearance as documents can protrude through the file folder at different heights. Conventional three ring binders present other challenges because they do not work well with the hanging folders. The cost of the file folders are also not insignificant and add to the expense of any office.
The present invention comprises a simple, cost-effective solution to the shortcomings identified above in the form of a sturdy file bar for hanging documents in a standard file cabinet or drawer that eliminates the need for the hanging folder. The bar, which can be made of heavy-duty polypropylene or other plastic material, is preferably on the order of one sixteenth of an inch thick and includes integrally formed vertically oriented downwardly facing hook portions at respective ends of the bar to support the bar on rails of a file cabinet or drawer. The hook portions are preferably formed by a trapezoidal recess in the lower surface of the bar that creates an opening for receiving and retaining the rail therein while permitting lateral sliding of the bar along the rail. The recess is partially formed by a leg member at the distal end to prevent the bar from slipping off the rail. The bar preferably includes three apertures spaced approximately four and one quarter inches apart to coincide with three hole punched documents or three ring binders.
The above described invention eliminates the need for a hanging file folder, significantly increasing the space available in a typical file drawer or cabinet. For example, a magazine, catalog, or any bound material can be draped over hanging file bar and placed directly on the rails of the file cabinet without utilizing a hanging file folder. For loose paper documents, the bar can be used in conjunction with removable spine binders to hang directly on the file cabinet rails as well. The bars can also be used with various sized three ring binders to hang the binders in a file drawer or cabinet.
Other features and advantages of the invention will become apparent from the following detailed description, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings which illustrate, by way of example, the features of the invention
The bar 20 is approximately three quarters of an inch in height and is substantially rectangular except for the hook portions 40 at the ends 45 of the bar 20. A preferred thickness is approximately one sixteenth of an inch, which provides the requisite stiffness to resist buckling but does not take up unnecessary space on the rails 30. For larger documents, two or more bars 20 can be used together if a single bar does not support the weight of the document. At each end, a hook member 40 is integrally formed by creating a void in the bar 20 along a lower edge 50 in the shape of a trapezoid. The trapezoidal recess 55 defines a mouth that is wider at the entrance than at the upper edge, which provides a guiding surface 60 as the bar 20 is lowered onto the rails 30. A lip or leg portion 67 extends downwardly adjacent the recess 55 on the distal side to capture the rail 30 and retain the rail in the recess. The bar 20 is preferably formed with two or three holes 65 centered along the length of the bar to coincide with documents having two or three punched holes in the margin.
For bound documents 70 the bar 20 can be inserted into a middle section of the document as shown in
It should be understood that the description above is merely illustrative, and that those of ordinary skill in the art will readily discover modifications and alterations to the examples above. The scope of the present invention includes all such modifications and alterations and should not be limited in any manner to the specific embodiments described above or depicted in the drawings. Rather, the scope of the invention should be limited only by the words of the appended claims, using the common and ordinary meanings of the words except where expressly denoted herein.
