The lion kingdom has always believed the inventor of the pop socket has gotten over compensated through a very effective patent enforcement program. By now, there's no reason such a simple thing should still be even $10 in fiat money.
Lacking a desire to spend $10 to reverse engineer such a thing, there was finally a good profile shot of the mechanism. It's basically 2 toilet plungers stacked. A system of 2 curved profiles & 2 square profiles make the toilet plungers. The curved parts bend & lock into an inside out & inside in position. The square parts create a vertical offset required by the curved parts to lock into the inside out position & divide the height of the retracted position.
The trick is TPU delaminates if bent across the laminations. Something would have to be done to strengthen the laminations or it would have to be printed as a flower. The only reason it locks into 2 positions is the tension propagated around the circle. It wouldn't work with separate flower pedals.
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