Appeal No. 96-0154
Application No. 08/047,434
of secondary carbides and/or coarse primary
carbides, recited in the claims, would be inherent
to the use of AISI D2 (or similar tool steels) when
heat treated in the manner that Metals Handbook
discloses as optimum for these compositions.
OPINION
The above noted rejection cannot be sustained.
As correctly indicated by the appellants, the Metals
Handbook disclosure is directed to heat or tempering
treatments of tool steels per se rather than a clad sheet
which includes a tool steel layer and a low-alloy or mild
steel layer of the type claimed by the appellants and
described in, for example, the Admitted Prior Art. Like the
appellants, we consider the Metals Handbook to contain no
suggestion of applying the tempering treatments described
therein to such clad sheets. Moreover, the examiner's
contrary view is militated against by the evidence of record
which reflects that tempering treatments reduce the hardness
of tool steels (e.g., see Figure 8 of the Metals Handbook) and
that reduced hardness is antithetical to the abrasion
resistance characteristic desired in this art (e.g.,
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