Appeal 2007-0612
Application 09/838,866
The Appellant acknowledges (Spec. 1:14-19):
In the past light weight shoes have usually been
formed by making a shoe out of a light metal, usually
aluminum with steel inserts or calks placed at the points
of expected wear. Such shoes, however, have been found
to have both poor wear and poor strength characteristics.
Generally, use of lightweight metals without inserts in
horseshoes has been found to produce the same type of
problems: rapid wear and severely reduced strength when
compared to the standard steel or iron horseshoes.
The Appellant does not indicate that Eom’s horseshoe ductility was desired in the
Appellant’s acknowledged prior art.
Weaver teaches that adding the disclosed silicon boride composition as a
strengthening agent to molten aluminum, magnesium, titanium and their alloys,
thereby forming a metal matrix composite from what otherwise would be a molten
metal composition, has the benefit of increasing stiffness, lowering the coefficient
of thermal expansion, and increasing strength (col. 1, ll. 22-25, 53-57; col. 2, ll. 3-
10, 15-16).
The Examiner should consider whether one of ordinary skill in the art,
through the use of no more than ordinary creativity, would have added Weaver’s
silicon boride composition strengthening agent to the prior art horseshoe
lightweight metal, thereby forming a metal matrix composite, to provide the
horseshoe with the desired increased strength (Spec. 1:17-19). See KSR Int’l. Co.
v. Teleflex Inc., 127 S.Ct. 1727, 1741, 82 USPQ2d 1385, 1396 (2007) (In making
an obviousness determination one “can take account of the inferences and creative
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