Patent ID: 7308177

Claim:
A method of fabricating an image-conducting optical fiber bundle having at least one rigid intermediate section, the method comprising: winding a plurality of continuous light-conducting fibers about a mandrel in order to form a plurality of individual fiber ribbons each of which fiber ribbons is in the form of a fiber helix including a continuously wound light-conducting fiber having close-fitting convolutes; laterally bonding a selected portion of each fiber helix in order to form an ends region in which portions of the continuous fiber are fixed in side-by-side relationship; removing each fiber helix from the mandrel about which it was wound; stacking the ends regions of plural helixes in superimposed relationship and bonding the superimposed ends regions together to form a fiber bundle including a unitary ends section comprising the adjacently-bonded ends regions of the constituent helixes; cutting across the ends section in a direction including a component of displacement transverse to the wind direction of the convolutes of each constituent fiber ribbon in order to form an image-conducting bundle with distinct and opposed input and output ends, each of which input and output ends includes a portion of the ends region of each of the fiber ribbons included within the fiber bundle, wherein, subsequent to the cutting of the ends section of the fiber bundle, each constituent fiber ribbon included in the fiber bundle is itself comprised of plural constituent fibers; mutually bonding one of (i) adjacent portions of the continuous fiber of each fiber ribbon and (ii) adjacent portions of constituent fibers of each fiber ribbon along an intermediate region not corresponding to the ends region of that ribbon, but coinciding with a corresponding intermediate region of each of the other fiber ribbons; and mutually bonding corresponding intermediate regions of the fiber ribbons of the fiber bundle in order to form within the bundle at least one rigid intermediate section.