DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Continuity
The prior art present in, and the prosecution histories of, parent applications 14/422882 (US Patent 10077829), 16/132559 (US Patent 11174929), 17/526215 (US Patent 11852229), and 18/511738 (US Patent 12292105) have been reviewed prior to the preparation of this Office action. The examiner notes that the “Lubricating System” invention of the current application was restricted out of the parent applications, i.e., this application is a Divisional.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claims 1 and 3 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Wang CN102182754 in view of Nishibata CN1405483.
Claim 1. Lubricating system comprising, in combination: a housing (1); a mount (2, 3) including a bearing (2, 3) rotatably mounting the mount relative to the housing; a radial bore (14) extending from an outer periphery of the housing to the bearing; an axial bore (15) extending from the outer periphery of the housing to the radial bore; a plug (6 received in 14) located in the radial bore; and grease (see written descriptions of “grease” throughout copy of Wang English translation attached to this Office Action) filled in the axial and radial bores; wherein the plug is located intermediate the outer periphery of the housing and the axial bore but does not extend into the radial bore beyond the axial bore. Wang discloses that the grease can be fed to the bearing through the channels by some “other feeding appliance”, which is not shown. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to ensure that the Wang “other feeding appliance” is a plunger slideably received in the axial bore in a controlled manner such that the grease is located intermediate the plunger and the bearing, with sliding the plunger inward in the axial bore forcing an amount of grease into the bearing since Nishibata teaches such to have been well known to be desirable/obvious (See Nishibata, plunger 11 in the axial bore of housing 10a and the written description thereof in the copy of the Nishibata English translation attached to this Office Action).
Claim 3. (Original) The lubricating system as recited in claim 1, wherein a radial hole (bearing hole through bearing races that receives the bearing balls 3 is radial within the broadest reasonable interpretation in that it has a radius) is formed in the bearing in communication with the radial bore. Alternatively, Nishibata teaches a radial hole (6) to have been known to be desirable for directing grease to the balls of the bearing, such that it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify as such.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claim 2 is objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
The Wang/Nishibata structure resulting from the 35 USC 103 modification elsewhere above does not disclose or suggest that the plunger would be threadably received in the bore. The prior art of record does not provide any teaching, suggestion or motivation to modify toward the entirety of applicant's claim 2, nor was there any readily apparent cogent reasoning that is unequivocally independent of hindsight that would have led one of ordinary skill in the art at the time the invention was made to modify the prior art to obtain the entirety of applicant’s claim 2 invention.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to VICTOR L MACARTHUR whose telephone number is (571)272-7085.
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/VICTOR L MACARTHUR/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3618