Appeal No. 97-2943
Application No. 08/319,174
limitations, including nozzle positions and resilient seals,
are not, even remotely, suggested” in view of the examiner’s
reasoning.
With regard to claims 4 through 7, we agree with the
examiner that in the absence of any unexpected results, or the
solution of a stated problem, the particular dimensions
employed by appellants in suction tube distance and the amount
of pressure applied to the resilient seal would appear to be
nothing more than obvious engineering design choices.
Appellants have made no attempt to show otherwise by pointing,
for example, to some criticality of these values. The mere
contention that the applied references do not teach these
values, per se, is not evidence of nonobviousness in view of
the examiner’s rationale.
In their reply brief, appellants point to various “new
points of argument” by the examiner but they offer no
substantive counters to the examiner’s reasoning, whether new
points or not.
We do not contend that there are no arguments appellants
could have made to convince us of any error in the examiner’s
position. We merely contend that appellants did not make
7
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