Appeal No. 2003-0510
Application No. 09/524,904
over Sederberg in view of Ramun. We also shall sustain the
standing 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) rejection of claims 2-12, 14-16, 19
and 20 as being unpatentable over Sederberg in view of Ramun
since, as noted above, appellants have not separately argued the
patentability of these claims with any reasonable degree of
specificity.
III. Claim 17
Claim 17 differs from the applied prior art in that it calls
for the cross blade and the tie plate to form therebetween a
first angle between one and thirty degrees. This is illustrated
in appellants’ Figure 3 where the major faces of the cross blade
60 form an angle " with the inner surface 56b of the tie plate,
and is described in the paragraph spanning pages 6-7 of the
specification where the benefits of this arrangement are
explained. In rejecting claim 17, the examiner has (1) taken the
position (answer, pages 3-4) that the shim 96 of Sederberg can be
used to adjust the angle between the tie plate and the cross
blade, (2) cited In re Aller, 220 F.2d 454, 105 USPQ 233 (CCPA
1955) for the principle that “it is not inventive to discover the
optimum or workable ranges by routine experimentation when
general conditions are disclosed in the prior art” (answer, pages
3-4), and (3) urged that appellants have merely used routine
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