Appeal No. 1999-0681
Application No. 08/697,478
considered appellant’s request, but find nothing to persuade us that our decision to reject
the appealed claims under the first paragraph of § 112 was in error.
In support of our new rejection, we held that there was no descriptive support in
the original specification, including the original claims, or the original drawings for the
recitation in claim 1 that the shoulder (18) is “formed on the inside of the conical [sic]
shaped wall,” for the recitation in claims 1, 5 and 14 that the shoulder is formed “at the
second end of the [conical shaped] wall,” and for the recitation in claim 14 that the
shoulder is “formed in the inside surface of the conical [sic] shaped wall” (see pages 8-9
of our decision). Instead, as noted on page 9 of our decision, Figure 2 of appellant’s
drawings shows that the shoulder is formed in an axially extending cylindrical end
portion adjoining a conically shaped wall portion.
Appellant does not challenge our finding that the shoulder is in the cylindrical
wall portion, rather than the adjoining conically shaped wall portion. Instead, appellant
contends that we erred in our rejection by referring to the claimed “conical shaped wall”
as a “conically shaped wall.” In particular, appellant contends that we erred by
interpreting the word “conical” too narrowly as meaning “conical throughout its entire
length” (request for rehearing, page 2).
In this regard, appellant contends on page 2 of his request for rehearing that “the
phase, [sic] ‘conical shaped wall’ must include the cylindrical portion . . .” On page 5 of
the request for rehearing, appellant further contends that the term “conical” is “broadly
understood in the art to mean an interface between a pipe and a catalytic converter” with
the result that it may include shapes other than the dictionary meaning of the word
“conical.” As we understand appellant’s position, a “conical shaped wall” differs from a
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