Appeal No. 2000-0076
Application 08/970,231
The prefabricated unit 30 is then conveyed
to the building site by the truck 26 where it is
lifted into position by means of a crane 32 (see
FIG. 3) onto the building foundation 33 [column
3, lines 27 through 60].
In applying Biffis to support the obviousness rejection
of independent claims 1, 27 and 39 (see pages 4 and 5 in the
answer), the examiner finds correspondence between the
subassembly production lines recited in the claims and Biffis’
basic construction area 16 and storage bays 18, and between
the dwelling assembly alley recited in the claims and Biffis’
parallel production lines 11 and 12 and railway tracks 14 and
15. These findings are untenable inasmuch as the foregoing
elements
in the Biffis facility simply do not constitute subassembly
production lines and an associated dwelling assembly alley as
recited in claims 1, 27 and 39. The examiner’s ambiguous and
unsubstantiated references to well known plant layouts, common
sense and industrial engineering concepts (see pages 6 and 11
in the answer) afford no cure for these shortcomings.
Rizk, the examiner’s secondary reference, discloses a
plant (see Figure 6) for producing building modules which “are
transported to a proposed building site where they are set in
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