Appeal No. 97-2645
Application 08/448,638
Appellants’ claim 1 requires that the pressure plate therein
be comprised of a ring-shaped first plate having a friction
surface for frictionally contacting a clutch disc and “a
plurality of fan-shaped second plates circumferentially dis-
posed with respect to said first plate,” with each respective
fan-shaped second plate having at least one support portion
that is formed integrally with the second plate. The prior
art relied upon by the examiner is completely devoid of any
teaching or suggestion regarding the problems confronted and
solved by appellants and is utterly silent concerning any
possible modifications to the conventional one-piece pressure
plate seen therein, let alone any modifica- tions of such a
one-piece pressure plate that would have
resulted in the particular multi-piece pressure plate claimed
by appellants.
In our opinion, the examiner’s position in this case
is clearly based on impermissible hindsight gained only from
appellants’ disclosure, and for that reason will not be sus-
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Last modified: November 3, 2007