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US 4,381,208 AGranted
Method of making a ribbon cable
AssigneeLucas Industries Limited
InventorJohn R. Baverstock
Life of this patent
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AssigneeLucas Industries Limited
InventorJohn R. Baverstock
Estimating the term…
In multi-core electric cable in which the cores extend in side-by-side spaced and parallel relationship, instead of producing the cable with the cores continuously interconnected by surrounding insulation so that when cut into lengths the insulation has to be pulled or cut apart in order to separate the cores for connecting, the cable is made at the outset at intervals along its length with the cores separate, never having been interconnected. This is applicable to most known methods of manufacturing flat multi-core electric cable including those in which each core has an individual insulating sheath interconnected to form the multi-core cable by the bonding of the sheaths together or to backing strip material or to both. In application to multi-core cables made from bare conductors sandwiched between strips of insulating material separation of the cores at intervals is achieved either by omitting at intervals the bonding of the insulating material or by omitting the insulating material at intervals or by a combination of both.
A method of manufacturing multi-core cable of the kind in which a plurality of leads, each including a conductive core in an insulating sheath, are held in parallel and side-by-side relation, the method including the steps of arranging individual separate leads in parallel and side-by-side relation, retaining said leads in said relation, and, while so retained, continuously applying heat to bond by fusion the insulating sheaths of a plurality of leads each to its neighbour or to a backing strip on at least one side of the cable throughout major portions of the lengths of said leads, and stopping the application of heat at intervals to interrupt the bonding of the leads at predetermined intervals along the length of the cable to produce regions which separate the said major portions of said cable, and which regions are short compared to said major portions and at which regions the sheaths are not bonded either to each other or to a backing strip.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.