Appeal No. 96-0089
Application No. 08/027,060
patentable and nonobvious from the cited prior art.
Accordingly, we shall reverse each of the rejections applied
by the examiner.
Initially, we note that all of the applied rejections are
premised upon the basic combination of any one of three
primary references (Autio, Skaugen, Laapotti) with Karvinen or
Weideburg. The dispositive issue on appeal relates to the
propriety of this basic combination. We agree with appellants
essentially for the reasons expressed in their Brief and Reply
Brief that the collective teachings of the subject prior art
references would not provide a person of ordinary skill in the
papermaking art with the requisite motivation to position an
air-transfer device in an opening outlet nip defined between a
transfer roll and a straight run of a press felt extending
from the transfer roll to a press nip. Even accepting, as a
general proposition, that air transfer devices of the sort
recited in the instant claims have been used in prior art
papermaking machines (Karvinen, Weideburg) at certain
locations to maintain a web (or leader) in contact with a
felt, the examiner has failed to establish why it would have
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