Appeal No. 2005-0785 Page 3
Application No. 10/192,959
In reaching our decision in this appeal, we have given careful consideration to
the appellants’ specification and claims, to the applied prior art references, and to the
respective positions articulated by the appellants and the examiner. For the reasons
which follow, we cannot sustain the examiner’s rejection.
Claim 1, the only independent claim before us for review, reads as follows:
1. A method for making drip irrigation hose comprising:
rotating an outlet forming wheel having a knife blade
on its periphery;
positioning a backing wheel to engage the outlet
forming wheel and establish a nip, the backing wheel having
a circumferential slot[1] into which the knife blade fits as the
outlet forming wheel rotates;
moving a strip of plastic film through the nip to form
single outlet slit outlets repeatedly along the strip as the knife
blade rotates;
forming on the strip an elongated flow regulating
passage; and
forming inlets to the flow regulating passage that are
spaced from the outlets to form a substantial path length
from each inlet to a corresponding outlet, wherein the outlets
couple the flow regulating passage to the exterior of the
hose.
The paragraph bridging pages 1 and 2 of appellants’ specification, which
constitutes the AAPA relied upon by the examiner as the jumping off point of the
obviousness rejection, reads as follows:
U.S. Patent 4,247,051 discloses a drip irrigation hose
formed by bending a strip plastic film along its length to form
an overlapping longitudinal seam between opposing
1 In light of appellants’ underlying disclosure and the positions of appellants and the examiner in
this appeal, we interpret “circumferential slot” as a slot extending around the entire periphery of the
backing wheel.
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