Appeal No. 2001-1372 Page 14
Application No. 08/018,841
the examiner’s rejections of claim 16 as being anticipated by Davis and as being
unpatentable over Davis.
With regard to dependent claims 17-19, appellants correctly point out that Davis
provides no teaching of sealing the projectile in the bore to prevent blowby, sizing the
projectile to tightly engage the bore or cold working the projectile in land regions to
thereby transform the land regions from an initial low yield strength condition to a yield
strength condition more than 10 times stronger than the initial low yield strength
condition. Thus, we cannot sustain the examiner’s rejection of these claims under 35
U.S.C. § 102 as being anticipated8 by Davis.
We shall sustain the examiner’s rejection of claims 17 and 18 as being
unpatentable over Davis. We find that one of ordinary skill in the art of projectiles such
as bullets and weapon barrels would have understood the desirability, if not necessity,
of minimizing blowby of the propulsion pressure used to launch the projectile from the
weapon bore, as well as the desirability of sizing the projectile so as to contact the
rifling on the bore of the barrel to achieve the spinning effect for which rifles are known
in the prior art.9 It would thus have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to
size the projectile of Davis as closely as possible to the inner diameter of the bore of
8 Anticipation is established only when a single prior art reference discloses, expressly or under
the principles of inherency, each and every element of a claimed invention. RCA Corp. v. Applied Digital
Data Sys., Inc., 730 F.2d 1440, 1444, 221 USPQ 385, 388 (Fed. Cir. 1984).
9 In an obviousness assessment, skill is presumed on the part of the artisan, rather than the lack
thereof. In re Sovish, 769 F.2d 738, 743, 226 USPQ 771, 774 (Fed. Cir. 1985).
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