1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates generally to cap shapers. More specifically, it relates to cap shapers for caps made of non-rigid materials to form desired cap shape for purposes including wearing and displaying.
2. Description of Prior Art
Caps or hats in many occasions, such as in wearing and displaying, are often desirable to be in their designed shapes. For caps made of non-rigid materials the desired shapes naturally cannot be reliably formed without assistance due to the non-rigid nature of the material they are made of. To assist forming the desired shape a substantially rigid cap shaper is usually positioned inside the cap for providing support to the cap.
The prior cap shaper insert designs and products have been generally in the following categories:
In above categories the cap shapers need to be manually adjusted, either by trimming or by adjusting dimensions in order to fit the intended cap, which often are for stationary display and less suitable for wearing. No mechanism exists at the time of this invention for cap shapers to self-adapt to adequately fit for caps of a range of sizes and shape variations.
The general purpose of the present invention is to provide for caps made with non-rigid materials a new shaper to be positioned inside the cap to support and maintain the desired cap shape for wearing and displaying, substantially self-adaptive to conform to the cap shape and tolerate certain variations of the cap size and shape from its design, to reliably form the desired cap shape for purposes including wearing and displaying.
The present invention is a cap shaper for shaping a cap from its inside, comprising one or more members, the contact-members, with shapes and locations adapted for contacting certain regions of the hat inside of the cap for shaping the cap. The contact-members are interconnected or interjoined by elastic tension means enabling elastic displacement of the contact-members in response to external forces exerted to them, and maintaining a generally larger dimension of the outline defined by the collective of the contact-members when they are free from external forces, than that of the cap inside, thus when the cap shaper is positioned inside of the cap the smaller confines of the cap inside deforms the cap shaper by exerting contact forces to the contact-members, elastically displacing them, generating elastic tension in the cap shaper and its tendency to expand, which maintains tensioned contact of the contact numbers to the cap, hence shaping the cap.
For caps with shapes that can be defined by the outline of one or more given regions of the cap, the cap-shape-defining-regions, the number of contact-members, their shapes and relative locations on the cap shaper are determined to correspond and contact to that of those regions.
For a concave cap-shape-defining-region, the corresponding contact-member of the shaper can be adapted to be substantially convex and complementary in shape to that of the cap-shape-defining -region, which forms an alignment guide for mutual physical approaching and facilitates substantial self-adaptive process of contact between the contact-member and the-shape-defining-region. As the contact-member approaches by radial elastic displacement closer to its corresponding cap-shape-defining-region the concave of the region guides the contact-member by exerting lateral contact force to the contact-member causing its lateral elastic displacement to approach and align with its final contact with the corresponding region.
For illustrating the present invention, an embodiment of a cap shaper for shaping a cap comprises an cap shaper in the form of a solid loop, inextensible and transversely elastic, having a number of sections of the loop, the contact-members, generally protruding and convexly curved away from the loop, located corresponding to the locations of the cap-shape-defining-regions of the cap and alternately distributed and joined with or extended from a same number of generally concavely curved loop sections, the buffer-sections or elastic-buffers, around the loop; The shapes of the contact-members are adapted for tensioned contact with and supporting the corresponding cap-shape-defining-regions when the cap is positioned inside the cap, and the buffer-sections or elastic-buffers facilitate elastic displacement of the contact-members in respond to external forces.
When free from external force the cap shaper maintains a generally larger dimension defined by the collective outline of the contact-members than that of the cap inside. When positioned inside the cap under confines of the smaller space, the cap shaper elastically deforms, displacing contact-members in response to the contact forces from the cap-shape-defining-regions, resulting in increased internal elastic tension in the cap shaper and its tendency to expand and substantially self-adaptive in shape to conform to the cap inside, tolerating cap shape and size variation within the cap shaper elastic expansion limit, balancing the external contact force and maintaining the shape of the cap.
The flexible self-adaptive nature of the cap shaper of present invention provides major advantages over the prior arts in that it enables a single cap shaper to conform to and fit for caps of various sizes and minor random shape irregularities, eliminating the need for any manual cap shaper adjustment while facilitating adequate cap shaping as well as easy process of positioning and extracting the cap shaper in and out of the cap.
The elasticity of the cap shaper material and the relative dimension difference of a free cap shaper and the shaper when positioned inside the cap are optimized to provide adequate restoring tension in the cap shaper for its self-adaptive shaping of the cap, and to minimize the effort for cap shaper insertion into and extraction out of the cap.
Turning now descriptively to the drawings, in which similar reference characters denote similar elements throughout the several views.
Referring to the drawings, and in particular to
The contact-members of cap shaper 10 are the corner-bent sections along the cap shaper loop with convex curvature protruding from the solid loop, three of which are labeled a, b, c for illustration; The number of the contact-members matches that of the corner points of the cap polygon, the cap-shape-defining-regions, and are adapted to each contact and support a corner point of the cap polygon when the cap shaper is positioned inside the cap; The buffer-sections of cap shaper 10 are arches with concave curvature, alternately arranged with the contact-members along the cap shaper loop; Arch A in between bent corners a and b, arch B in between bent corners b and c are labeled for illustration; The cap shaper 10 is shown positioned in the cap 20 in
In
Illustrated in
In reality random minor cap shape deviation from its designed shape is inevitable.
Referring to
Cap 20 with the cap shaper 10 positioned in the cap are shown in
Another alternative self-adapting cap shaper embodiment according to present invention for caps having a polygon shaped top, as that of the cap 20 in
In this embodiment the factors including the extent of the bends of the sections of the contact-members, the degree of the curvature of the buffer-sections, and the difference in between the cap shaper dimensions when it is in free state and that when it is positioned inside of the cap are optimized for the cap shaper to provide support and shaping for the cap side walls as well as its polygon top, as shown in
This application claims the benefit of PPA Ser. No. 61/698,166, filed 2012 Sep. 7 by the present inventor.
Number | Date | Country | |
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61698166 | Sep 2012 | US |