Appeal No. 97-2822
Application 08/455,900
located/disposed," it would have been obvious to one of ordinary
skill in the art to provide such an arrangement so as to allow
the ring (18) therein to be associated with different types of
conventional floor drains. For the same reasons as noted above,
we will not sustain the examiner's § 103 rejection of independent
claim 10 or independent claim 13, or of claims 14 and 16 which
depend, respectively, from claim 13 and claim 10. In Emberson,
the bores clearly do not extend through the ring "from said upper
planar surface" and extend completely through said lower planar
surface, as required in appellant's claims 10 and 13. Regarding
claim 11, we will sustain the examiner's rejection, primarily
because appellant has not argued that the examiner's stated
modification of Emberson would have been unobvious. Moreover, we
must agree with the examiner that one of ordinary skill in this
art would have understood that the three bore arrangement of
Emberson is but one of the known arrangements of such bores in
the prior art, and that such an artisan would have found it
obvious to alternatively use an arrangement having two oppositely
located bores, for example, as is seen in appellant's own
"conventional" drain structure depicted in Figure 1 of the
application drawings.
10
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