Appeal No. 2004-1319
Application 09/933,329
brief. In contesting this rejection, appellant urges that the
examiner has engaged in hindsight reconstruction of the claimed
invention by improperly taking appellant’s own disclosure as a
blueprint for selectively piecing together the applied prior art
to defeat patentability. After careful consideration of the
disclosures of Fuca and Rosenbaum, we agree with appellant.
More specifically, we observe that Fuca touts the extremely
simple construction of the basin wrench seen therein, and the
fact that the double-ended wrench depicted in Figure 2 is
inexpensively constructed of two lengths of steel pipe defining
wrench end portions (25) and (26), wherein the two lengths of
pipe are of different outside and inside diameters and are joined
together by being “telescoped together near adjacent ends and
then . . . welded to one another at 27” (col. 2, lines 46-48).
As seen in Figures 2 and 5-8, the two different diameter pipe
sections provide the basin wrench (10) of Fuca with a larger end
portion (25) and a smaller end portion (26), wherein the
different size end portions are adapted to cooperate with
different size and configuration nuts (18, 18A, 18B and 18C). By
contrast, Rosenbaum discloses a multi-function faucet wrench
molded out of a suitable plastic material (col. 3, lines 20-21)
8
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