Appeal No. 2006-0887
Application No. 09/053,832
OPINION
In reaching our decision in this appeal, we have given careful consideration
to the appellant's specification and claims, to the applied prior art, and to the
respective positions articulated by the appellant and the examiner. As a
consequence of our review, we make the following determinations.
We turn our attention first to the rejection of independent claim 15 as being
unpatentable over Chambers in view of Conrad and Baranski. Chambers discloses
a saw machine comprising an input conveyor 10 and an output conveyor 20
disposed in series for carrying billets 12 and a gang saw assembly 18 disposed
between the input conveyor 10 and output conveyor 20. Chambers, which is
particularly concerned with a method and apparatus for changing the saw
assembly, does not discuss the details of the conveyors 10, 20 but does illustrate
them in Figure 1 as two endless conveyors. The endless belt element of conveyor
10 is trained around an output-side pulley and the endless band element of
conveyor 20 is trained around an input-side pulley. Although neither an input-side
pulley on the input conveyor 10 nor an output-side pulley on the output conveyor
20 is illustrated in Figure 11, the examiner finds that “it appears that [such] an
arrangement is inherent” (answer, p. 3). Regardless of whether such an
arrangement is in fact inherent, we find that one of ordinary skill in the art of
material handling and conveying would have immediately envisaged an
arrangement wherein the endless
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