Appeal No. 2003-0488
Application No. 09/086,286
closely adjacent one another.1 In our view, absent the use of impermissible hindsight, there is no
teaching, suggestion or motivation in the applied prior art for a person of ordinary skill in the art at
the time the invention was made to have reoriented the transport wheels of Konzal in the manner
proposed by the examiner. Second, notwithstanding the examiner’s view to the contrary, there is no
clear teaching in either of the applied references of mounting a pair of transport wheels on one side
of a common mounting wall with the driving elements for the wheels and their associated
processing stations on an exposed opposite side of the common mounting wall for easy accessibility,
as required by claim 1. In this regard, the partial vertical section view of the first transport wheel
found in Figure 9 of Stahlecker does not suffice. Third, as noted by appellants on pages 14 and 16
of the brief, Konzal’s machine forms cups with an open top, not a container having a lid and a
bottom. Accordingly, neither of the transfer wheels of Konzal have stations that assemble a lid to
the sleeve of the container, as required by claim 1. The examiner simply has not accounted for this
difference in rejecting the appealed claim 1 as being unpatentable over Konzal in view of
Stahlecker.2
1In this regard, note that partially completed cans formed at the Figure 8 station are
transported in the direction of arrow “D” to the Figure 9 station for completion by what appears
to be a conveyor of some sort.
2We appreciate that Stahlecker’s apparatus is for manufacturing a container having a lid
and a bottom. The examiner is not understood as proposing to modify Konzal in light of this
disclosure.
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