Telephone Cables Limited

Ronald Y Gill

Frank J Shepherd

Apparatus for laying an optical fiber unit into one of a plurality of parallel helical or reversing helical grooves in the outer surface of a cable core conveys the core along a path. A downstream guide is freely rotatable about the core path and has an aperture for feeding the fiber unit into the groove and an inward projection for following one of the grooves to maintain registration of the downstream guide with the groove. An upstream guide is indpendently rotatable about the core path and adjacent the downstream guide, and guides the fiber from a fiber supply toward the downstream guide. A servo drive is responsive to the rotation of the downstream guide relative to the upstream guide to drive the upstream guide such as to reduce that relative angle.

Cable core with a twisting channel, and laying optical fiber therein

In the production of an optical fibre cable a core (3) of thermoplastics material is extruded with a plurality of longitudinally-extending grooves (15) in its outer surface around an electrical conductor (1) and is initially cooled: then following the introduction of one or more fibres (11) in at least one of the grooves the core assembly is passed through an induction heating unit (17) in which the conductor is heated to an extent sufficient to soften at least the adjoining region of the core, and the core is twisted to cause the grooves to take up a helical or periodically reversing helical path, and is again cooled to leave the grooves in that condition.

Growing community of inventors

Chelmsford, United Kingdom

Ronald Y Gill