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Assignee3M Innovative Properties Company
InventorsGerald Benson, Kenneth Smith
Estimating the term…
A process for making molds for retroreflective sheeting and like articles includes making a substrate having a structured surface of geometric structures such as cube corner elements. The structured surface is in one embodiment partially replicated from a previous generation structured surface, and partially machined in the substrate. At least one of the faces of the structured surface is a compound face that has one machined portion and one non-machined portion, such as a replicated portion. The process can be used to manufacture substrates with desirable geometry cube corner elements, such as cube corner elements having a hexagonal outline in plan view, without requiring the use of pin bundling techniques or laminae. The process can also be used to manufacture articles having cube corner elements in which at least one face of the cube corner element has two constituent faces disposed on opposed sides of a transition line that is nonparallel to a nondihedral edge of such cube corner element.
A method of making a structured surface article comprising at least one cube corner element having a plurality of faces, the method comprising:
A method of forming in a substrate a structured surface extending along a reference plane and containing multiple preferred geometry (PG) cube corner elements each of which includes at least one nondihedral edge that (1) is nonparallel to the x-y plane;
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.