Appeal No. 2002-1213
Application No. 09/293,019
further contends that the automatic removal step of Boucherie is
"entirely obvious to apply to any station in the
process/apparatus to expedite the manufacturing process over
manual removal means."
Having reviewed and evaluated the applied prior art
references and AAPA, we are of the opinion that the examiner's
position regarding the purported obviousness of claims 1 through
38 on appeal represents a classic case of the examiner using
impermissible hindsight derived from appellants' own disclosure
in an attempt to reconstruct appellants' claimed subject matter
from disparate teachings and broad concepts purported to be
present in the applied prior art. In our view, there is no
motivation or suggestion in the applied references to Boucherie
and Lui which would have reasonably led one of ordinary skill in
the art to modify the AAPA in the particular manner urged by the
examiner so as to result in appellants' claimed subject matter.
Like appellants (brief, page 4), we note that the removal
means (11) shown in Figure 1 of Boucherie is located downstream
from the tufter and removes finished (i.e., tufted and end-
rounded) toothbrushes from an endless conveyor (5) associated
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