Appeal No. 2006-0340
Application No. 10/089,315
of the surface is carried out to first form a porous primer layer
containing solid particles, see col. 2, lines 32-45" (page 9 of
principal brief, third paragraph). However, as pointed out by
the examiner, the pretreatment step of Hasui, as well as other
method steps disclosed by Hasui, are not excluded from the
present claims on appeal. Indeed, the examiner explains that
"appellant also provides the steps of washing (which would
provide degreasing) and then blasting and then spraying of a zinc
alloy coating (see claim 7, for example, of the present
application)" (page 17 of Answer, last paragraph).
Appellant also submits that "there is nothing in this
article which would suggest that multiple spraying applications,
for example, would be superior to a single application" (page 10
of principal brief, last paragraph). First, we note that the
independent claims on appeal do not call for multiple spraying
applications. Moreover, the examiner properly points out that
multiple passes of a spray gun is a well-known technique in the
thermal spraying art in order to achieve the desired thickness.
Since the article teaches spraying to a desired thickness "it
would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to
apply multiple layers to get this desired thickness, with at
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