Adjustable Heel Yoke
A heel yoke system for securing a person's shod feet to skis, roller skates, crampons, or any other paraphernalia wherein the placement of the heel yoke is adjustable to provide a perfect fit for almost any kind of shoe over a wide range of sizes.
This application claims the benefit of Provisional Patent Application No. 61/400,463 for “Weight Lifting Sandals and Their Weights” filed on Jul. 27, 2010 by Thomas Jay Zeek
Much of the peripheral hardware shown in this application first appeared in Provisional Application for Patent No. 61/191,171 filed on Sep. 4, 2008 for “Weight lifting shoes and their weights” from Thomas Jay Zeek, and is shown in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/583,854 filed on Aug. 26, 2009 for “Weight Lifting Shoes” from Thomas Jay Zeek.
FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH OR DEVELOPMENTNot Applicable.
SEQUENCE LISTING OR PROGRAMNot Applicable.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTIONThis invention is for a method of attaching a person's shod feet to devices such as snow boards, skis, roller skates, etc. It is a heel yoke that is very adjustable which works with straps to fit a wide variety of shoes and shoe sizes to hold a person's foot securely to whatever apparatus it is a part of.
Finding ways to affix ice skates, skis, roller skates, crampons, and other paraphernalia to a person's shod feet has been an ongoing problem for centuries. Most people beyond a certain age remember the old roller skates that used a key to tighten them onto the sole of a shoe and a leather strap over the ankle to secure their heel to the roller skate. Those contraptions normally worked well enough for about fifteen minutes but the roller skate often came off of the user's foot at the front end as was left hanging by the leather strap. The invention was clever enough but it needed improvement to be used for anything important.
A very secure system for attaching crampons to boots can be seen in U.S. Pat. No. 5,901,471 to Warner but that system requires the user to wear heavy boots to protect their ankles from some of the hardware and the front clip part of the crampons will only fit on certain kinds of shoes and boots.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,040,633 to Coburn shows a very secure and comfortable system for affixing roller skates to a shod foot but it requires that the shoes be made with a special part on the heel to work with that system. Its bulkiness also would make an issue of where to store them when they're not being used and its large elaborate parts would be expensive to manufacture
Innumerable configurations of straps have been devised to secure sandals to people's feet and many of those configurations might be used to attach a ski or roller skate to a shod foot but straps alone will almost always have some give in every direction and aren't really practical when something needs to be really secure.
Another way people have sought to solve this problem is by the use of boots or shoes that are specifically designed to attach to skis or bicycle pedals. That system is very effective and also very expensive, and it normally renders the shoe or boot useless for all other activities.
The problem of affixing things like skis and roller skates is so difficult that sellers of roller skates in the United States have mostly given up, and sell almost exclusively roller skates that have their own shoe or boot permanently and integrally attached to the skates. This setup has been made more practical with the advent of cheap imports, but it is still a problem for parents to buy new roller skates every time their child's shoe size changes. It even brings up the question of whether their child is even going to do any roller skating before their shoe size changes again.
The use of integrally attached shoes or boots, or of specialized boots such as ski boots is not only expensive but it can also make activities such as roller skating, skiing, and snowboarding impractical if not impossible for people who need special shoes because of bone deformities or injuries to their feet, or who need one shoe sole thicker than the other.
There remains a need for and it is the object of the current invention to provide a means for attaching skis, roller skates, climbing equipment, and other paraphernalia to a person's shod feet that is inexpensive, highly adjustable, compact, and extremely reliable and effective.
BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE INVENTIONThe current invention is an adjustable, rigid, open backed heel yoke system that works in conjunction with straps and buckles to fit and hold securely to a wide range of shoes and boots.
A preferred embodiment of the current invention is shown in
The heel yoke 12 is basically U shaped and it has an open back design so that shoes and boots of varying shapes will fit into it. It is designed to only contact the user's shoe above the user's heel because if it applies pressure below the user's heel it might tend to pull their shoe off. It also has a slight front to back curve to make it fit the heel of a person's shoe at the correct angle at the top.
The heel yoke 12 is attached to the heel yoke anchors 14 by means of holding screws 22 that protrude through horizontal slots 18 in the heel yoke anchors and through vertical slots 16 in the bottom ends of the heel yoke. The holding screws 22 are fitted with washers 20 and wing nuts 24.
The heel yoke anchors 14 can slide in and out of the sandals to adjust them for the width of the user's shoe. This is accomplished by loosening the width adjustment screws 28 no more than about half of a turn and then pushing or pulling the heel yoke anchors into the desired position, and then tightening the width adjustment screws again. The width adjustment screws 28 go into tee nuts 30 that are embedded in the body of the sandals. The tee nuts 30 are visible in
The heel yoke anchors 14 do not have to fit the width of the user's shoes tightly because the sandals have a non-slip surface 60 which will not allow the user's foot to move around, although tightness of the heel yoke anchors can be used in some applications if desired, as in the roller skate shown in
The wing nuts 24 should be loose when the user first places their foot onto the sandal and when the user has their foot placed correctly on the sandal they can then push the heel yoke 12 tightly against the back of their shoe. This is the major object of this invention. The heel yoke of this invention can be positioned forward and backward and at varying heights and tilts so they will fit a wide variety of shoe styles, will continue to fit over years of shoe size changes, can be shared or handed down among different members of a household, and boots are never required to protect the ankles or the Achilles tendon.
With their foot placed on the sandal and the heel yoke 12 pressed firmly against the back of their shoe the user can tighten the wing nuts 24 to lock the heel yoke into that position. The user then feeds the long strap 34 back & forth across their shoe through the buckles 42 on the front straps 38 and finally through the buckle 42 on the heel buckle strap 36 and then presses the long strap 34 back onto itself. The long strap 34 is hook & loop material and the long strap's end 35 is the hook material while the rest of the long strap is loop material.
The long strap 34 and the heel buckle strap 36 are attached to the heel yoke 12 by circular shaped fasteners, in this example they are ordinary brass grommets 32, which allow the direction of the straps to be changed as needed to make the straps lay flat on the user's shoes, and the same is true of the front straps 38 being attached by the front grommets 40. It is desirable to make the length of the heel buckle strap adjustable.
The heel yoke anchors 14 go into the recesses 44 and the tee nuts 30 which are barely visible go into the width adjustment slots 26. The tee nuts 30 protrude through holes 47 in the base plate 46 by less than the thickness of the heel yoke anchors 14 so the heads of the width adjustment screws 28 will contact the heel yoke anchors before they hit the tee nuts. The use of the width adjustment screws 28 is described in paragraph 0024 above. The only reason the tee nuts 30 protrude at all is to maximize the number of threads in the tee nut so they won't be stripped. If the base plate 46 was thicker then the tee nuts 30 could be flush with the base plate 46, and the width of the width adjustment slots 26 would be reduced to the diameter of the width adjustment screws 28.
The depth of the recesses 44 is exactly equal to the thickness of the heel yoke anchors 14 so that the covering plate 50 will make direct contact with the heel yoke anchors to help hold the heel yoke anchors down.
The holding screws 22 have a thin flat head to minimize interference with ingress & egress of the user's shoe. They go through the horizontal slots 18 in the heel yoke anchors 14 and then through the vertical slots 16 in the heel yoke 12. The slots 16 & 18 are what make this embodiment of this invention work. The horizontal slots 18 allow the holding screws 22 and thereby the heel yoke 12 to be positioned forward & backward and the vertical slots 16 allow the heel yoke to be positioned at any desired height.
After the holding screws pass through the heel yoke anchors and the heel yoke they are fitted with washers 20 and wing nuts 24 that are tightened to hold the heel yoke in the desired position. The holding screws 22 are made by filing down the heads of carriage bolts because carriage bolts have the square section 23 that prevents them from turning inside of the horizontal slots when the user is trying to tighten the wing nuts.
A thin layer of rubber can be put on the outside of the heel yoke anchors for increased friction to help hold the heel yoke in place but for most applications that is unnecessary.
The bottom plate 52 has holes to accept the big part of the tee nuts 30 and it is the same thickness as the big part of the tee nuts so that a flat surface is created when the sandal is assembled. The front bottom plate 54 is a piece of steel that is bent to create tabs that the front straps 38 can be attached to and it is also the same thickness as the bottom plate 52. The tee nuts 30 go through the holes 47 in the base plate 46 into the recesses 44 that are created by gluing the T plate 48 onto the base plate 46.
The covering plate 50, the T plate 48, the base plate 46, and the bottom plate 52 are all made of polycarbonate. They are glued together with a suitable glue along with the front bottom plate 54 and the tee nut 30, and then the curved heel section 62 is glued onto the back of all of them. Then the rubber laminate 66 is glued onto the bottom of everything and the non-slip surface 60 is glued onto the top. The non slip surface 60 does not cover the entire curved heel section 62 because that would prevent it from flexing.
The covering plate 50 helps to hold down the heel yoke anchors 14 and provides a surface to glue down the non-slip surface 60 over the heel yoke anchors. Both the covering plate 50 and the non-slip surface 60 have holes to accommodate the heads of the width adjustment screws 28.
The curved heel section 62 is made of ordinary rubber and is there to facilitate walking. It is designed to flex if pressure is applied by the user's shoe because if it applies force to the user's shoe at that low point it might tend to pull their shoe off. The curved heel section 62 being flexible ensures that all of the pressure will be borne by the heel yoke 12 above the user's heel.
The heel yoke can be made of a variety of different metals and plastics provided that the plastic does not become brittle in cold weather, or it can be made from several pieces of differing material including leather and cloth for the uppermost portion of it, but a rigid design is preferred to help the heel yoke apply pressure high on the back of a person's shoe.
The heel yoke anchors 14 are replaced by special yoke anchors 15 that have ridges 70. The ridges 70 are intended to bite into the sole of the user's shoes. The width adjustment screws 28 are not present because the width of the heel yoke system is adjusted by the use of an old fashioned roller skate key. The width at the front of the roller skate also uses a roller skate key and clamps onto the user's shoes just like the old roller skates.
This embodiment of the heel yoke system uses all of the same straps and buckles as the weight lifting sandals in
Accordingly the reader will see that the heel yoke system of this invention provides a method of securing articles to a user's shod foot that is effective, safe, low cost, highly adjustable, and easy to operate.
Although the description above contains many specificities, exact descriptions of the hardware and materials used may be innumerable. The yoke anchors might not be adjustable for width and might be formed simply by bending the metal edges of a roller skate up or down, or the heel yoke could have small cylindrical ends that go into holes drilled through the holding screw. Examples shown should therefore not be construed as limiting the scope of this invention but as merely providing illustrations of some of the presently preferred embodiments.
Claims
1. a heel yoke system wherein a heel yoke is secured at its ends to an article of sporting gear by a means that allows for variable placement of said ends whereby the placement of said heel yoke can be adjusted to fit a variety of shoes.
2. the heel yoke system of claim one wherein the means is pins which protrude through vertical slots near the ends of the heel yoke whereby said slots can be slid up and down on the pins to affect the height of the heel yoke.
3. the heel yoke system of claim one wherein the means is pins that can be positioned forward and backward on the article of sporting gear to affect the fore and aft position of the heel yoke.
4. the heel yoke system of claim 2 wherein the pins can be positioned forward and backward on the article of sporting gear to affect the fore and aft position of the heel yoke.
5. the heel yoke system of claim one wherein the article of sporting gear is equipped with movable parts that the heel yoke attaches to whereby the width of the heel yoke system can be adjusted.
6. the heel yoke system of claim two wherein the article of sporting gear is equipped with movable parts that the heel yoke attaches to whereby the width of the heel yoke system can be adjusted.
7. the heel yoke system of claim three wherein the article of sporting gear is equipped with movable parts that the heel yoke attaches to whereby the width of the heel yoke system can be adjusted.
8. the heel yoke system of claim four wherein the article of sporting gear is equipped with movable parts that the heel yoke attaches to whereby the width of the heel yoke system can be adjusted.
Type: Application
Filed: Jul 26, 2011
Publication Date: Feb 2, 2012
Inventor: Thomas Jay Zeek (North Hollywood, CA)
Application Number: 13/190,522
International Classification: A63C 1/04 (20060101);
