Appeal No. 2001-0592
Application 09/110,824
In reaching our decision in this appeal, we have given
careful consideration to appellant’s specification and claims,
to the applied prior art references, and to the respective
positions articulated by appellant and the examiner. As a
consequence of our review, we have made the determination
which follows.
Having reviewed and evaluated the applied references, we
are of the opinion that the examiner’s position regarding the
purported obviousness of claims 1 through 6 on appeal
represents a classic case of the examiner using impermissible
hindsight in order to reconstruct appellant’s claimed subject
matter. In our opinion, there is no motivation or suggestion
in the applied patents to Cherrington and Trinkle which would
have reasonably led one of ordinary skill in the art to modify
the endless abrasive belt of Cherrington in the particular
manner urged by the examiner based on the abrading device and
wet process of abrading disclosed in Trinkle. Like appellant
(brief, pages 6-11), we view the structure of the abrasive
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