Appeal No. 2001-2332
Application 08/909,249
presently claimed subject matter. More particularly, the
examiner has not provided any reasonable teaching, suggestion or
motivation as to why one of ordinary skill in the art at the time
of appellants’ invention would have found it obvious to modify
the simple molding system of Herman, used for forming a single
automotive deck lid (25) from sheet molding compound (SMC), to
somehow form a plurality of molded articles “in a first array
distribution” as set forth in claim 29 on appeal, or set forth
any reason as to why the simple molding and handling apparatus of
Herman, even if combined with a further automated article
transport and handling system like that in Hansen, should be
further modified to include a variable configuration transport
head like that in Riley, Montferme or Lebret.
After a review of the applied references and the examiner’s
attempted combination thereof, we must conclude that the examiner
has merely sought out “concepts” in the article transport and
robotics arts and utilized appellants’ own disclosure in the
present application as a road map for piecing together the
unrelated robotics and article transport references without
providing any legitimate motivation for modification of Herman’s
SMC loader and compression molding press, and thereby engaged in
an improper hindsight reconstruction of the claimed subject
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