Inner Sleeves

The Inner Sleeve acts as a candy "tray" for the PEZ candy.  The inner sleeve is attached to the head with a metal or plastic hinge pin, and goes inside of the stem.   Like the stem, the inner sleeve comes in many different colors and styles, dependent upon the age of the PEZ.

Shown below are various styles of inner sleeves.

Inner Sleeve for Wire Head Spring and Steel Hinge Pin. Note the hole through the top of the inner sleeve for the Steel Hinge Pin.	Inner Sleeve with Plastic Hinge Pins (nubs) and Wire Head Spring. Note the cutout in the inner sleeve that is sized to fit the coiled portion of the Wire Head Spring.
Inner Sleeve with Plastic Hinge Pins (nubs) and molded with a Single Leaf Plastic Head Spring. The *looped* portion of the head spring is small... typical of the early Plastic Head Spring designs.	Inner Sleeve with Plastic Hinge Pins (nubs) and molded Single Leaf Plastic Head Spring. The *looped* portion of the head spring is larger... typical of the later Plastic Head Spring designs. PEZ made the loop larger to increase the spring "force" against the head.
Another variation of an Inner Sleeve with Plastic Hinge Pins and Single Leaf Plastic Head Spring. Note the modified profile of the sleeve at the top near the head spring.	Inner Sleeve with Plastic Hinge Pins and molded Multiple Leaf Plastic Head Spring. The top profile of the sleeve is different than the "looped head spring" style of sleeve due to the multiple leafs in the spring. Also note that the diameter of the Plastic Hinge Pin is much larger than the earlier single leaf spring design.

 

Marbleized Inner Sleeve -

On older dispensers sometimes the inner sleeve is not molded in a solid color, but instead the plastic is "marbleized" with two different colors of plastic. Usually, the second color is a whitish color. This probably occurred because of a couple of reasons. The first possibility is that maybe the PEZ molding plant used some "filler" plastic pellets, and blended the filler in with the base color of plastic. Since colored plastic is bit more expensive than white or clear, using a filler color would allow the quantity of colored plastic to stretch farther. The second possibility is that this also occurred when PEZ changed colors when preparing to mold the next colored batch of inner sleeves. It would be easier and faster to dump the next color of plastic pellets into the infeed hopper on the injection molding machine than what it would be to thoroughly clean out all of the *old* color. With two different colors in the hopper, you would get a marbleized color in the plastic as one color runs out and the next color begins. Since the inner sleeves are an internal piece, there would be no reason to make sure that the inner sleeve color is *pure*, from a quality and appearance standpoint.

In either case... the results are some very COOL looking inner sleeves! In the pictures below, you can see a marbleized inner sleeve. Keep in mind that the marbleizing is much more pronounced when looking at an actual sleeve (I found that it is a bit difficult to get a good picture of the actual effect).

Very Cool!

Inner Sleeve Tab-

This is a fun little sleeve variation! The Inner Sleeve Tab or Tongue is a small little tab that is located on the bottom front side of the inner sleeve.  Although it has been found on 4.9 dispensers, it is more commonly found on dispensers with a 3.9 patent number. It is my guess that this tab was designed into the sleeve to help keep the front-to-back fit of the sleeve within the stem snug. Another transitional variation from a 3.9 patent to a 4.9 patent dispenser.