Other

Michael Kossak

Paul J Kotowski

Douglas Arthur Schultheis

Richard A Daley

Bernard A Fitzmorris

Ted Lubin

Dalita R Tomellini

A dental flossing device is characterized by a flossing circuit comprised of a flossing supply spool and a take-up spool mounted to a housing. The floss feeds from the supply spool along a pair of prongs forming a fork extension of the handle and is stretched across the prongs and appropriately tensioned to be inserted into a users mouth for flossing. To maintain tension, a pair of ratchet pawls are jointly engageable with a ratchet mounted for co-rotation with the take-up spool. The pawls are offset relative to the ratchet teeth to ensure appropriate tension. Tension on the supply spool side of the flosser is achieved with a tension arm in constant engagement with tension teeth co-rotatably mounted with the spool. When a floss advancing trigger is not depressed, a brake pawl formed at one end of the trigger is spring biased into locking engagement with these teeth while the tension arm assures proper tension on the supply side. In an alternative preferred embodiment, only one tensioning ratchet pawl engages the ratchet mounted for co-rotation with the take-up spool. A different ratchet pawl, mounted to one end of a ratchet arm pivotally secured to the flosser housing beneath the ratchet, is engaged by the trigger to drivingly contact the ratchet to rotate the take-up spool. In this latter embodiment, the brake pawl is replaced with a projection formed on the trigger that is adapted to engage the supply spool tensioning ratchet to lock the ratchet in the released position of the trigger to prevent supply spool rotation and maintain the floss circuit in a tight condition.

Manually held dental flossers

A dental flossing device is characterized by a flossing circuit comprising a floss supply spool and a take-up spool mounted to a housing containing a gear train assembly adapted to rotate the take-up spool in a winding direction. The floss feeds from the supply spool along a pair of prongs forming a forked extension of the handle and is stretched across the forked prongs and appropriately tensioned to be inserted into a user's mouth for flossing. To maintain hygiene, the take-up spool is mounted outside the housing. In a manually operated embodiment, a manually depressible trigger projecting from the housing is operable to rotate the take-up spool with reverse rotation thereof being prevented with a ratchet mechanism. Release of the manually depressible trigger reversely rotates the supply spool through a short arcuate interval to remove slack and then locks the supply spool against unwinding rotation through gear teeth. In a preferred manually operated embodiment, first and second ratchet mechanisms are utilized to prevent reverse rotation of the supply and take-up spools while sufficiently tensioning the floss circuit. In other embodiments, the housing may be formed for mounting the flossing device as an attachment to a hand-held motorized toothbrush handle equipped with a motor from which projects and output shaft. Depending upon the model, the gear train assembly may be modified to convert longitudinal stroking motion of the shaft or oscillatory motion into uni-directional rotating motion to rotate the take-up spool in one direction only.

Flossing equipment and method of operation

Growing community of inventors

Chevy Chase, MD, United States of America

Michael Kossak