Appeal No. 2000-0093
Application No. 08/874,812
appeal brief (Paper No. 10), the appellants state that “Applicant [sic] hereby cancels
Claims 2-7, 12, and 20-21, without prejudice.” As amendments must be submitted in a
paper separate from the brief (see MPEP § 1207), the proposed cancellation is informal
and has not been clerically entered into the record. Nonetheless, we construe it as an
indication that the appellants will formally cancel claims 2 through 7, 12, 20 and 21 in
due course and no longer intend these claims to be subject to the appeal. Hence, the
appeal as to claims 2 through 7, 12, 20 and 21 is hereby dismissed, leaving for review
the standing rejections of claims 1, 8 through 11, 13 through 19 and 22 through 26.
THE INVENTION
The invention relates to the manufacture of consumable investment patterns
used to make metal castings. Claim 1 is representative and reads as follows:
1. A method of making a casting having free-form, undercut or hidden
interior surfaces, comprising:
(a) designing a three-dimensional computer graphic model of said
casting;
(b) computer sectioning the graphic model into graphic members
which are at least one of blocks and slabs having sides normal to the
sectioning interval;
(c) carving a physically solid member for each of the graphic
members, the solid members being (i) constituted of an easily meltable,
dissolvable or evaporative solid material, (ii) proportional to and
enveloping its corresponding graphic member, and said carving being
carried out by accessing and carving into and through two or more of said
sides of each solid member that possesses at least portions of said
interior surfaces and thereby essentially duplicate the corresponding
graphic member;
(d) securing the carved solid members together with matching
2
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