Appeal No. 95-0942
Application 07/877,772
are individually wrapped about the pipe, rather than the
continuous wrapping required by the appellants’ claim 1 and
disclosed in Lindsey and Koopman. In fact, it is the objective
of the Tailor invention to improve upon the type of pipe covering
in which
individual sheets are used by eliminating the weakness in the
joining of the length-wise seams (column 1, line 38 et seq.),
which are not present in a continuously wrapped system.
Moreover, there is no teaching in Tailor of stressing the
individual sheets as they are wrapped around the pipe; each sheet
is stretched longitudinally to make it heat unstable (column 2,
line 5 et seq.), which is necessary since the tightness about the
pipe is achieved by heat-shrinking the unstable sheet as the
final step of the process (column 2, lines 22 and 23).
Lindsey discloses a pipe wrapped with a continuous sheet,
which is placed under tension during application. No adhesive is
utilized, nor is there any additional treatment of the sheet
subsequent to the mechanical act of wrapping. After
acknowledging that a certain amount of tension must be applied as
the continuous sheet is wrapped, Lindsey goes on to state that
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Last modified: November 3, 2007