Appeal No. 2000-1298
Application 08/938,779
recited braze clad of appellants’ claimed subject matter. To
account for these differences, the examiner points out that
aluminum and its alloys are notoriously well known metals for
fabricating diverse parts and that the Gire patent teaches a
closure plug “somewhat like Knocke’s” in which the plug is
deformed into gripping contact with a header wall to hold it
in place and wherein, to ensure a good seal with the wall, the
plug can optionally be soldered in place. From these
teachings, the examiner concludes that it would have been
obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of
appellants’ invention “to form the closure plug of Knocke out
of a well known material such as aluminum, and in view of
Gire, to provide a solder clad layer on the aluminum plug in
the well known manner to provide a reliable seal with the wall
in which the plug is installed” (answer, page 4).
After discussing the closure plug of Knocke and
deformable partition (2) of Gire, appellants assert (brief,
page 7) that the concepts involved in these two patents are
mutually incompatible and that there is no reason to combine
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