Appeal No. 97-1242
Application 08/226,521
DECISION ON APPEAL
This is an appeal from the final rejection of claims 1
through 5, all of the claims in the application. In the answer
(page 1), the examiner now indicates that dependent claim 5 is
allowable. Accordingly, we have before us for review the
rejection of claims 1 through 4.
Appellant’s invention pertains to a thermally-actuated
steam trap. An understanding of the invention can be derived
from a reading of exemplary claim 1, a copy of which appears in
the APPENDIX to appellant’s main brief (Paper No. 17).
As evidence of obviousness, the examiner has applied
the documents listed below:
Stalker 1,572,970 Feb. 16, 1926
Clayton et al. (Clayton) 4,295,605 Oct. 20, 1981
Yumoto 5,197,669 Mar. 30, 1993
A reference already of record in the application and applied by
this panel of the board in a new ground of rejection, infra, is:
Jones 2,289,020 Jul. 7, 1942
The following rejections are before us.
Claim 1 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as being
unpatentable over Yumoto in view of Stalker.
2
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