Appeal No. 2001-1799
Application 09/097,655
appliance unit as claimed [brief, pages 4-8].
The examiner responds that “[s]ince the battery pack and
hand grip of the primary references each have their respective
electrical connector, it clearly would have been obvious to form
the housings thereof so as to mate in a telescoping arrangement,
to better protect the contacts. This would inherently result in
each primary reference having both coarse and fine centering as
claimed” [answer, page 4].
As appellants and the examiner have argued this issue,
the question before us is whether the motivation to combine
either of the primary references with any one of the secondary
references comes from the applied prior art or knowledge
generally available to the artisan or does the motivation come
from appellants’ own disclosure. On this record, we agree with
appellants that the rejection is not supported by the applied
prior art for essentially the reasons argued by appellants in the
brief.
There is no question that each of the cited prior art
references teaches a single guiding means. Although the examiner
refers to some of the guiding means as coarse guiding means and
others of the guiding means as fine guiding means, the
significance of the terms coarse and fine really have no meaning
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