Appeal No. 95-5066
Serial No. 07/931,330
been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art (i) to tack bond the meter-sized Ketcham layers forming
the Dubuisson laminate to reduce misregistration of the layers as suggested by Hamuro; and, (ii) to
stagger the tack bonds because certain components in Dubuisson could not be
properly tack welded without staggering or omitting at least one tack within the interior of a large
Dubuisson multilayered green stack (Substitute Answer page 4, last paragraph to page 5, last
paragraph).
However, the examiner fails to identify where such a suggestion of using Ketcham layers with
X-Y planar dimensions of one or more meters to form a Dubuisson substrate can be found
in the applied prior art. Ketcham does provide green structures in "long continuous lengths or relatively
short sheets" (column 9, lines 47-48), e.g., "[n]arrow ribbons or sheets many meters wide" (column 8,
lines 44-45). However, the examiner has not explained why one of ordinary skill in the art would have
been motivated to completely reengineer and increase the mechanical complexity of the laminating
apparatus of Hamuro to permit staggered welding, e.g., by adding X-Y translation movement capability
of the existing hot irons or by increasing the number of hot irons and selectively controlling individual
application of the hot irons to the stacked sheets, as argued by appellant (Brief pages 18-19), so that
Ketcham "sheets many meters wide" could
be used to form a substrate which Dubussion suggests has "standardized dimensions of 152.4 x 86.36
mm" (column 1, lines 38-39). It would appear to be easier to simply cut a Ketcham sheet into smaller
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