Appeal No. 2000-0901
Application No. 08/553,321
Appellant and the examiner agree that claim 8, the only
independent claim on appeal, differs from Hedeman in the five
respects specified on pages 7 and 8 of appellant's brief. The
first two of these are that Hedeman discloses a clamp 18,
rather than a "right tubular sleeve having a fixed largest
internal diameter less than the external free state diameter
of the pipe," as recited in claim 8. With regard to this
limitation, the examiner cites Thompson, which discloses a
hose-to-coupling joint in which a ring b having an internal
diameter smaller than the external diameter of the hose a is
positioned near the end of the hose to compress it (Fig. 1),
and then the neck c of the coupling, which has external
grooves, is forced into the compressed area, "pinching [the
hose] between the inner surface of ring b and the outer
surface of c" (col. 2, lines 16 and 17). The examiner takes
the position that it would have been obvious to utilize a ring
(sleeve) as disclosed by Thompson as the clamp 18 of Hedeman,
the Thompson ring being a clamp "of any suitable type."
Although appellant argues that such a modification of Hedeman
would not have been obvious (brief, pages 10 and 11), we
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