The present invention is about a safety helmet, suitable for being used during working activity in many sectors, like for example in building or road sites in civil field, or in iron plants, steel plants, mines and naval dockyards, just to mention some of them, in industrial field.
It is known that safety helmets, also known as hard hats or skullguards, are used by workers or by the personnel in certain workplaces to protect the head from the impact with other bodies or from falling objects.
In fact, for instance near scaffoldings or overhead workplaces for building works, or near blast furnaces or in foundries in industrial field, the operators expose their body, especially the head, to high risks like accidental hits against iron structures, falling objects or mechanical components of different nature, very dangerous for their physical safety.
Therefore, in such cases, safety helmets are an indispensable, as well as compulsory, instrument, their use being provided by the European Directive no. 89/686 EEC called "Individual protection devices" to protect the head.
Said helmets are provided for protecting the parietal zones, the top of the head and the nape of the user who wears them.
The safety helmets are usually made of resistant plastic material, for example thermoplastic or reinforced polycarbonate or glass fibre, or of metallic material, like aluminium or other light alloys.
They are prevalently made by a cap inside which a reinforcement is obtained, composed by an annular band which surrounds the user's head in wearing conditions of the helmet, and by two or three mutually crossed shock-proof straps disposed between the top of the user's head and the upper internal wall of the cap.
The function of the straps is to space the user's head from the cap to limit to the utmost the negative effects caused by hits against other standing above bodies or by objects falling on said user's head.
Both the annular band and the shock-proof straps are fixed to the cap at anchoring points symmetrically disposed on the internal wall of said cap.
The safety helmets are secured to the user's head by the presence of proper blocking systems disposed on the annular band, at the zone applied to the user's nape.
Said blocking systems allow the helmet to be adapted to the different use conditions and requirements of the user, as well as they allow the helmet to be worn by different users, each clearly having his own head conformation.
The prior art provides for several systems for securing the safety helmets to the user's head.
A first kind of helmets of known type comprises an annular band provided by a couple of mutually symmetric tangs, made of plastic material, able to be joined together in different positions according to the conformation of the user's head. One of the tangs has mutually equidistant slight projections, snap-coupled in correspondent through holes made in the other tang, according to a system typically used in cloth-caps usually worn by young people in everyday life.
The inconvenience of this kind of safety helmets is represented by the fact that the user must change every time the mutual position of the two tangs to adapt the helmet to different use conditions.
This is performed either by taking off the helmet from the head and mutually releasing the two tangs to dispose them in a new desired position, or by performing said operation wearing the helmet, with evident disadvantages in terms of manipulation simplicity and regulation accuracy.
Another inconvenience is due to the fact that the continual execution of the tang adjustment operations leads to the wear of the tangs projections, compromising their coupling efficacy.
In another kind of helmets of known type, said tangs are mutually coupled by the snap-insertion of one tang inside the other according to different positions.
More particularly, a first tang has a plurality of teeth along its lateral edge which are coupled to a respective toothing provided on the internal surface of an opening longitudinally obtained on the other tang, providing for a male and female connection type.
An inconvenience of this second kind of known helmets is due to the fact that the user must exert a rather intense strength to uncouple the two tangs and to adjust them according to a new mutual position.
Moreover, in this case too the repeated adjustment operations leads to the wear and sometimes to the breaking of the tangs, with the consequent need to replace them.
These inconveniences were overcome with a further kind of safety helmets of known type, in which the tangs are placed in a shaped case and they are mutually adjustable by a rack system comprising a toothing obtained on both tangs, which engages with a gearwheel placed inside the case, movable by an external knob connected therewith and operable by the user.
The mutual position of the tangs is set up by turning the knob in one or in the other direction, depending on whether said tangs should be mutually loosened or tightened.
It is evident that such a tangs adjustment system allows to fit in an easy and practical way the safety helmets to the user's head and it removes the inconvenience of spoiling the tangs with their continual mesh.
However, also this kind of safety helmets of known type has some inconveniences.
A first inconvenience is due to the fact that the knob stands out from the helmet in a rather considerable way, consequently having a not negligible encumbrance.
As a consequence, another inconvenience is represented by the fact that said knob is dangerous for the physical safety of the user, increasing the possibility of hits against other bodies when he moves his head and the negative effect of the impacts of the nape against other structures or on the ground.
Not the least inconvenience is the fact that the user, to perfectly fit the helmet on his head, should perform in any case a manual adjustment operation which can also continue for a lot of time.
In particular, it is the main object of the invention to allow the user to wear and to adjust a safety helmet in a more practical and rapid way with respect to the equivalent helmets of known type.
It is a second object of the invention that the helmet does not have constructive parts which increase its encumbrance and generate or aggravate the danger of the user's head hits against other bodies or any structure.
Said objects are obtained by a safety helmet according to the contents of the main claim.
According to a preferred executive embodiment of the invention, the elastic means are placed inside a shaped case having an arc shaped transversal sectional profile to substantially reproduce the conformation of the nape of the user's head.
Advantageously, the safety helmet of the invention can be correctly worn by the user in an extremely rapid way, without needing to perform rather complicated manual adjustment operations to fit it to the conformation of the head.
At the same time and as much advantageously, the invention allows to reduce the external encumbrance of the helmet, thus limiting with respect to the prior art the seriousness of the nape's impacts against other bodies.
More advantageously, the helmet of the invention is particularly ergonomic, because it reduces the expected risks and other trouble factors of the particular use conditions, by impeding as little as possible the gestures and the assumption of certain positions by the user.
Said objects and advantages will be better highlighted in the description of a preferred embodiment of the invention given in an explanatory but not limiting way, with reference to the figures of the annexed drawings, wherein:
The safety helmet of the invention is shown in an axonometric view in
where it is worn by a user indicated with U, and in a bottom view in
It is noted that it comprises a shaped cap 2, made of plastic material particularly resistant to hits and atmospheric agents, internally provided with a harness, visible in
According to the invention, the annular band 4 comprises elastic means, generally indicated with numeral 7, at the portion 4a supported on the nape N of the user's U head T, suitable for making adaptable the annular band 4 to the conformation of the user's U head T, to grant the adherence stability of the safety helmet 1.
The annular band 4, made of plastic material, and the straps 5, 6, made of synthetic material, are fixed to the shaped cap 2 at anchoring points 22, substantially disposed according to the vertexes of a rectangle on the internal wall 2a of the shaped cap 2.
According to another executive embodiment, not shown in the annexed drawings, the straps forming the harness could be more than two, for instance three, fixed to the shaped cap at anchoring points disposed on its internal walls according to the vertexes of an irregular hexagon.
As shown in
Each of the anchoring points 22 comprises a button 24, fixed to the shaped cap 2 and inserted in a buttonhole 25 obtained on the annular band 4 at each of the anchoring points 22, in order to bind said annular band 4 to the shaped cap 2.
According to the preferred executive embodiment of the invention described hereby, the elastic means 7 are placed inside a shaped case 8, partially visible in the Figures described so far and well shown in
The shaped case 8, preferably but not necessarily made of plastic material, is connected to the annular band 4 by a couple of core parts 9, 10, made of plastic, steel or other material, symmetrically disposed inside the shaped case 8, from which their extremity 9a, 10a, bound to the annular band 4 by first fixing means generally indicated with numeral 11 and formed by rivets in this specific example, protrudes.
It is evident that, in other executive embodiments of the helmet according to the invention, said fixing means could be of different kind, like for instance screws or other things.
In further executive embodiments, the shaped case could be connected to the annular band through a couple of tangs formed integral with the same annular band.
About the core parts 9, 10, in
Each of the core parts 9, 10 protrudes from the shaped case 8 by means of a through hole, not shown in the attached figures, obtained on the respective lateral edge 8a, 8b of the shaped case 8.
The elastic means 7 placed inside the shaped case 8 are formed by a couple of helical springs 14, 15, each of them slidingly containing the corresponding core part 9, 10 and placed at one end 14a, 15a abutting against the transversal wall 12, 13, and at the other end 14b, 15b abutting against the respective lateral edge 8a, 8b of the shaped case 8.
In
Preferably but for explanatory purpose only, the second fixing means 18 comprise a male element 19, protruding from the concave surface 17a of the cover 17, suitable for being snap inserted in a female element 20 obtained on the convex surface 16a of the box 16.
However, it is clear that in other executive embodiments of the invention the second fixing means could be of different kind from the above described one.
As shown in
Operatively, the user U acts by grasping the shaped case 8 to fit the safety helmet 1 to the conformation of his head T, with reference to the different use conditions that he wants to apply to said helmet 1.
The user U pulls outwards with a hand the shaped case 8, thus compressing the elastic means 7 and expanding the annular band 4.
This operation is made possible by the elasticity of the annular band 4 and it is facilitated because the buttons 24 slide inside a buttonhole 25 of reduced dimensions, so that as many pivoting points of the annular band 4 as the anchoring points 22 are obtained in this phase.
Subsequently, the user U puts the helmet 1 on his head in the desired and more congenial position, then releasing the shaped case 8 by placing it abutting against, or near, the nape N of his head T, securing the correct and stable position of the safety helmet 1.
It is thus particularly easy to wear, fit and secure a safety helmet according to the invention to the user's head.
This is performed starting from the phase in which the user is leaning the safety helmet on his head, without needing to perform further adjustments to secure the perfect adherence of the helmet.
The accomplishment of a shaped case which substantially reproduces the shape of the user's nape means to have at disposal a safety helmet particularly comfortable during its use.
Such aspect is also improved by the application of a pad, made of soft and flexible material, on the surface of the shaped case disposed toward the nape.
Moreover, the constructive expedient of providing for a buttonhole of limited dimensions in the anchoring point of the annular band, instead of a longitudinal slit like in most of the safety helmets of known type, allows a very efficient deformation of the annular band during the initial phase of wearing the helmet.
In fact, the uncoordinated movement of the annular band under the traction applied by the user to enlarge said annular band is avoided, this being an element which reduces the efficacy of the operation and causes inconveniences to said user.
Differently from a series of safety helmets of known type, the helmet of the invention does not have protuberances on its back side, which are dangerous for the physical safety of the user if he hits his nape on the ground.
The absence of protruding parts avoids as well the presence of further contact points on the helmet, and thus on the user's head, with other adjacent bodies or structures, without limiting the freedom of movement.
On the basis of the aforesaid description, it should be understood that the safety helmet according to the invention achieves all its objects and attains all X the previously mentioned advantages.
Modifications to the safety helmet of the invention could be introduced in the production stage.
In particular, both the shaped case and the elastic means placed therein could be of different kind from the one described in the present patent.
All the described and cited embodiments, even if not shown in the annexed drawings, when they should fall within the scope of protection of the following claims, should be considered protected by the present patent.
This list of references cited by the applicant is for the reader's convenience only. It does not form part of the European patent document. Even though great care has been taken in compiling the references, errors or omissions cannot be excluded and the EPO disclaims all liability in this regard.