Patent Application
20150343703
1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method for manufacturing a basketball, which accelerates the process for making basketballs and ensures layers forming the basketball bound with improved closeness.
2. Description of Related Art
A basketball is made by overlaying layers of rubber sheets. In the conventional manufacturing method, as shown in
(1) Manually adhering the inner cover and the surface is a time-consuming and effort consuming process, and therefore is less economical for mass production.
(2) After each of the adhesion steps, time is required for “drying,” making the overall manufacturing method time-consuming and less productive.
(3) Manually adhering the inner cover and the surface is not only time-consuming, but also less reliable, because human power may fail to achieve full closeness between the layers. As a result, air bubbles may exist between the inner cover and the fabric-covered bladder, and between the surface and the inner cover, in turn deteriorating the quality of the resultant basketball.
In view of this, the present invention makes improvement to the prior art by providing a novel method for manufacturing a basketball, which includes: providing two mold halves that jointly form a vacuum mold; opening the mold halves; laying an inner cover in the mold halves; placing a fabric-covered bladder into the mold halves; drawing out air from space between the mold halves to make the space vacuum, thereby using vacuum suction to bind the inner cover and the fabric-covered bladder as a whole with high closeness and forming a middle bladder; taking out the middle bladder from the mold halves; laying a surface in the mold halves; placing the middle bladder back into the mold halves; making the space between the mold halves vacuum again to integrate the surface and the middle bladder together with high closeness into a semi-product; placing the semi-product into a vulcanizing mold; and heating the vulcanization, thereby obtaining the finalized basketball. By using the vacuum mold, the closeness between the fabric-covered bladder, the inner cover, and the surface is ensured, and the time required for making the basketball can be significantly reduced, in turn saving the time costs.
Please refer to
The technical scheme of the present invention provides the following benefits and advantages:
(1) When the inner cover pieces 12, 13 and the surface pieces 15, 16 are laid in the mold halves 10, 11, since the cavities of the mold halves 10, 11 define the working area, the placement can be quick and accurate. Then after the bladder is placed and the mold halves are closed, the “adhesion” can be easily achieved, so the process is time-saving, thereby reducing time costs.
(2) When the inner cover pieces 12, 13 are adhesively attached to the fabric-covered bladder 14, and when the surface pieces 15, 16 are adhesively attached to the middle bladder 140, the “vacuum suction” provided between the mold halves 10, 11 can expel any air bubbles between the inner cover pieces 12, 13 and the fabric-covered bladder 14, and between the surface pieces 15, 16 and the middle bladder 140. As a result, completely closeness is achieved, so the layers are closely bound to form a well-integrated basketball.
(3) Since air bubbles are unable to form between the layers, the resultant basketball is free from any irregular bulges and thus is perfectly round.
(4) The disclosed method use “vacuum suction” to eliminate the need of performing manual adhesion as required by the prior art, so as to achieve automatic and rapid adhesion, thereby accelerating the overall manufacturing process.
(5) Since the layers are bound with high closeness, when put into vulcanization, the semi-product can be well integrated as a whole final product.
The present invention has been described with reference to the preferred embodiments and it is understood that the embodiments are not intended to limit the scope of the present invention. Moreover, as the contents disclosed herein should be readily understood and can be implemented by a person skilled in the art, all equivalent changes or modifications which do not depart from the concept of the present invention should be encompassed by the appended claims.
