Maurice Williams examined applications in mechanical art units for seventeen years.
This is the work our background fits most exactly. A mechanical patent attorney has to read a drawing the way an examiner reads it, and know which structural details will be treated as meaningful and which get dismissed as design choice.
Drawings from expired US patents. Lit: US 1,889,814, Richard B. Spikes, Automatic Gear Shift, filed 1931, granted 1932.
Mechanical fields have deep prior art, so the search decides the strategy.
Hand tools have been patented for a century and a half. Pumps and valves the same. Novelty in these fields rarely sits in the overall form; it sits in one mechanism, one interface, or one geometry.
A search here is the cheapest part of the matter and the part that changes the plan most. It tells you whether the claim you wanted is available, and it tells us which detail to build the claims around before we write a word of the specification.
When the search says the space is too crowded to be worth a filing fee, that is what you will hear.
Where we work
- Fluid handling, pumps, valves, manifolds, and inline mixing
- Marine and subsea machinery built for pressure and corrosion
- Hand tools
- Drilling and cutting tool accessories
- Industrial equipment and precision tooling
- Clean power generation and emissions-control hardware
Questions we get about mechanical patents.
Can I patent an improvement to an existing tool?
Yes, and most mechanical patents are exactly that. An invention does not have to be a new category of thing. It has to be new and non-obvious over what already exists, and an improvement to a known tool clears that bar regularly.
What decides it is how narrow the improvement is and how well the claim captures it without reciting features you did not need.
How much do the drawings matter?
In mechanical cases, a great deal. The drawings show the relationships a claim depends on, and an examiner reads them alongside the words. A specification that describes a structure the figures do not support is the most common way a mechanical application loses room to amend later.
My accessory fits someone else's machine. Can I still patent it?
Yes. An accessory is its own article and can be claimed as one. Accessories that fit a large installed base are often more commercially useful than a patent on the machine, because the market is already there.
Whether you can sell it is a separate question from whether you can patent it, and worth checking if the base machine is itself under patent.
Is it worth patenting something this simple?
Sometimes not, and we will tell you when. Simplicity is not the obstacle; a simple mechanism can be perfectly patentable. The obstacle is a crowded field, where the only claim available is narrow enough that a competitor designs around it in an afternoon.
A search answers that question for a fraction of what a prosecution costs.
A sketch is enough to start.
Send what you have, however rough. We will tell you what the search would need to cover and what it is likely to find.