Appeal No. 1999-0695 Page 7
Application No. 08/427,018
feeding apparatus in which one of ordinary skill in the art would have anticipated that faults
could occur, we do not agree that the combined teachings of these references would have
suggested the modification proposed by the examiner. From our perspective, one of ordinary
skill in the art reading the Benson disclosure would have understood that, upon occurrence of a
production fault as described therein, the leader from feeder 27 must be threaded, by
conventional means known in the art, through the wind-up section and that the splicing
mechanism in no way facilitates that procedure. Rather, the function of the dump nip and the
splicing mechanism is to permit the formation section to run at normal line speed to establish an
acceptable extruded film web while the wind-up section is rethreaded (presumably at a rate
significantly slower than normal line speed) with the leader and brought up to the speed of the
formation section so that the film web can then be threaded into the wind-up section at normal
line speed. As there is no indication in the AAPA that the continuous web therein must be run
through the print unit at normal line speed during the web-up or threading process, it is not
apparent to us why, without the benefit of the appellants' disclosure, one of ordinary skill in the
art would have been motivated by the teachings of Benson to provide a web-up device (splicing
mechanism and secondary web roll) downstream of the first print unit for outputting a spliced
web to the second component.
For the foregoing reasons, we shall not sustain the examiner's rejection of claim 4 or
claims 5 and 9 which depend from claim 4 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as being unpatentable over
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