Appeal No. 97-0612
Application 08/322,218
curved surfaces facilitate the flow of material and
that abrupt shoulders should be avoided [first Office
action, page 3].
In a similar vein, the examiner states that
it would be merely an obvious exercise of the
mechanical skill expected to be possessed by a tool
design engineer to provide radiused fillets in the
exposed surfaces subjected to material flow in the
arrangement of Sparks, such as the surfaces of key 200,
following the advice of Skinner that exposed surfaces
should be rounded in order to facilitate the flow of
material [answer, page 4].
While Skinner does teach that extrusion die surfaces exposed
to the flow of metal should be rounded and curved to facilitate
such flow, the particular surfaces involved are all upstream of
the outlet face of the die. Since the outlet face of a die
defines the shape of the extruded product, the configuration of
its surfaces is dictated by the desired shape of the product. In
the present case, none of the applied references relates to a
tube having a slit with curved edges, or to the appellants’
reasons for making such a tube, i.e., to produce improved
transformers. As indicated above, the Vaughan and Skinner
products are whole tubes having no slits, and the Sparks product
is a flat strip formed from a tube having a slit with sharply
cornered edges. The key 200 disclosed by Skinner, which forms
the sharply cornered slit, effectively constitutes part of the
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