Appeal No. 2002-0049 Page 15
Application No. 09/317,538
A reference may be said to teach away when a person of ordinary skill, upon
[examining] the reference, would be discouraged from following the path set out
in the reference, or would be led in a direction divergent from the path that was
taken by the applicant.
While Abe does not teach that all edge segments of the tool against which the work
material will impinge are relieved, there is nothing in Abe that warns a person of
ordinary skill against relieving all edge segments of the tool against which the work
material will impinge are relieved . In other words, there is nothing in Abe that teaches
that relieving all edge segments of the tool against which the work material will impinge
should not, or cannot, be utilized.
Lastly, we believe that the examiner did not employ impermissible hindsight in
the rejection under appeal since there are ample teachings, suggestions and
motivations in the applied prior art supporting the combination of Abe and Dombrowski
as set forth in the rejection of claim 1. In this case, Abe's silence as to the manner of
forming the chamfers would have provided sufficient suggestion and motivation for a
person of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was made to have relied upon
known methods of chamfering edges, such as manually using a hand-held router8 and
routers mounted to robot that are computer controlled as taught by Dombrowski. Since
Dombrowski specifically teaches the benefits of a router that is mounted to robot that is
computer controlled over a hand-held router (e.g., improved product quality, increased
8 Admitted by the appellant as being prior art (specification, page 3, lines 3-12).
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