Manufacturing

Blanker Improvements

Place bars tool additions

It is now possible to offset a blanker bar from a clicked entity during the initial creation and subsequent adjustments. This has been achieved with two new edit bar options, a mode (From Edge, From Centre or On Entity) together with an Offset value.

• From Centre – enter an offset value and the bar will be placed so that its centre is offset from the identified entity by this value
• From Edge – enter an offset value and the bar will be placed so that its edge is offset from the identified entity by this value
• On Entity – the bar will be added so that its centre lies along the identified entity

These modes all have keyboard shortcuts available so they can be enabled directly by keypress.

Additional method of creating uppers

There is a new mode called Freehand from points that has been added to the upper creation tool, to complement the existing modes Offset from design and Offset from extents.

This can be used in conjunction with Impact’s standard snapping tools to create simplified uppers.

Merging Pushers on the Male Upper

There is now a facility to merge multiple overlapping pushers together. There are two new features that have been added to help achieve this.

Firstly, the Union tool, shown below, which becomes available when editing an upper and two or more pushers have been created. When clicked, uppers that overlap are joined together into a single pusher.

Secondly, the Auto Union toggle has been added to the freehand upper creation mode. This allows the users to draw over multiple uppers. When the shape is completed all uppers that intersect the new shape are merged together.

Dieboard Visibility Mode

This option has been provided to maintain compatibility with the Stripper tool. To clarify, the One-ups setting toggles the visibility of the following palette types:

• Cut
• Crease
• Cut-Crease
• Perforation
• Score
• Reverse Crease
• Reverse Score

The Dieboard setting toggles all other palettes and symbols in the dieboard layer.

Completion Visibility Mode

There is a Completion Visibility toggle button that enhances the visibility of the main regions and one-ups of the blanker, like the stripper tool’s Completion visibility. You can configure the fill area colours in the Environment settings.

Below is an example of the completion visibility enabled using its default colours:

Below shows the uppers, male base and female. These can be individually toggled by the current visibility toggles that have updated icons.

Collision and Contact detection

Like the Stripper tool, the Blanker tool can now detect collisions with some parts of the blanker. In addition to this it can also detect what panels of a carton are making contact with the bars and female. You can configure the fill area colours in the Environment settings.

• Collision – a collision is where two regions of the blanker would collide when tooling is on press running impressions. For example, when a bar and upper or a bar and female base occupy the same space. When these cases are detected the area of collision is shown in bright red, like the stripper tool. Below shows an example where the female board (in pink) is overlapping the pusher (in light blue).
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• Contact – due to the nature of blanking, there are cases where the carton flexes when the tooling is on press running impressions. To make these areas more visible to users there is the Contact concept. This works like the collisions but is considered acceptable. Bars and the female base can make contact with the carton. When this contact happens, the area in the panel on the carton is shown in light green.
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  • Contact Distance – this increases the contact area’s size to make the contact area more visible to the user.
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  • Contact Panel – this toggle enables the full panels of the carton to be highlighted rather than a set distance from the point of contact. In this mode the Contact distance entry is disabled.
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Keyboard shortcuts and tool standardisation

Many of the blanker tools now use the standardised OK, Cancel and Finish actions that can have keyboard shortcuts assigned to them.

Blanker Frame MTS grip offset

The Grip Offset value store in the Blanker Frame MTS can now have the value populated by a layer variable like already existing MTS variables found in the other diemaking MTS.

• BlankFrameGripOffset – Type Length

Stripper Improvements

Female Components

Impact now supports the insertion of Female Stripping Components. These are created and placed in a similar manner to existing Male Stripping Components.

This comes with its own Dynamic Stripping Component tool and pin arrangement as well as system settings to create your own components or use components commonly available on the market.

The Custom Component DSC tool within the stripper tool can be used to place female components within stripped areas. These are set up via the new Female Components MTS and Stripper System MTS.

Toolbar simplification

There is a new command category in the toolbars called Tools. This now contains all the Dynamic Stripping components tools for easier toolbar setup; this also comes with a Tools toolbar. Found in the customization panel of the stripper tool, previously they were mostly in the Edit Category.

Keyboard shortcuts

These are configured in the Environment Options > Keyboard section. The following new ones have been added:-

• Edit Bar Infer Angle
• Edit Bar Infer Horizontal
• Edit Bar Infer Perpendicular
• Edit Bar Place DSC
• Edit Bar Place Nick
• Edit Bar Flipped
• Stripper Creator
  • Bridge
  • Paired Simple
  • Paired Normal
  • Nicks
  • Male Symbol
  • Female Symbol
  • Double Symbol
  • Symbol Pattern
  • Inside
  • Perimeter
  • Path
  • Paired Radii
  • Clashes Visibility
  • Completion Visibility
  • Dieboard Extras Visibility
  • Male Visibility
  • Female Visibility
  • Front Edge Upper Visibility
  • Front Edge Lower Visibility
  • Default Claw Offsets Visibility
  • Construction Lines Visibility
  • Dieboard Visibility
  • Nicks Visibility
  • Slot Visibility
  • Select None

Stripper machine MTS form resizing

Various controls inside the stripper machine MTS now resize correctly, accounting for the current language. Previously, non-English users were seeing some controls obscured or missing.

Inside and perimeter optimization

Performance improvements to Hole and Path Finding tools have sped up the creation of stripped areas, especially with areas that contain Beziers.

Rubber Split Improvements

Automatic Rubber Tool – New Split Modes

There is a new section in the Automatic Rubber Master Tool Settings on the One-up interior, Perimeter and Waste Areas pages.

Previous versions of Impact only provided the Corner mode of splitting rubber entities, in which a rubber entity is split in a corner, something like this:

Perpendicular is a new mode that has been added. This would be the result with an Offset of  0.0mm specified:

Changing the Offset to 10.00mm would result in this:

From the settings you can specify the Minimum length of an entity to be split and the Maximum length of a split section. There is also a new Mode setting with the Path options. When using the Path option, the algorithm moves along the path of rubber entities until it reaches the end. This Mode is chosen from the following:

• Ends – When the path has been traversed further than the specified Spacing value, it will create a split at the end of the current rubber entity. This will repeat until the end of the path has been reached.
• Running – This option is similar to the Ends option except that the split is created along the length of the entity rather than at the end.
• Distributed – This option is similar to the Running option except that the total length of the path is calculated and then it is divided into equal length pieces, where the length of each piece is roughly the size of the Spacing value.

Plotting Optimisation – Speed Improvements

Impact 2019 introduced an advanced option to the Plotting Optimisation page:

In some circumstances this was quite slow to produce the result. Changes have been made to significantly improve the speed of this option.

Support for newer DXF export versions in DXF plotter driver

It is now possible to define the required DXF version when plotting with the DXF driver. This is achieved in the Plotter Machine Master Tool Settings:

Dieboards

Centre notch parameters

The centre notch on both flatbed dieboard and stripping boards can now be configured to allow a negative value, where the notch is outside of the wood extents for the respective units.

Furthermore, the corners of the notch can now have a chamfer or fillet defined.

Vertical Balance Knives

There is now the option to create vertical balance knives instead of the usual horizontal ones. This is defined in the Dieboard Master Tool Settings.

Alternate balance knives formula

Aligned with Bobst recommendations there are now three different formulae available for calculating the number of balance knives that should be added to the dieboard. This is defined in the Dieboard Master Tool Settings.

The three options are: Original (this simply uses the existing Impact formula); Bobst SP 2019 and Bobst SPO 2019.

Bobst SP2019 Formula

SPO 2019 Formula

It is also possible to define your own formula by selecting which palette types and the percentage of these which should be used when doing the calculations for the balance knives.

Additional Auto Tasks Triggers for Diemaking Tools

Auto Task triggers allow configured automations to react to the use of certain Impact tools, typically firing before and after their usage. Whilst Impact already has a great number of triggers, we’ve now introduced an additional 12 relating specifically to the diemaking tools, including:

• Dieboard Add Dovetail (After)
• Dieboard Add Dovetail (Before)
• Dieboard Nicks (After)
• Dieboard Nicks (Before)
• Dieboard Nicks Creator (After)
• Dieboard Nicks Creator (Before)
• Dieboard Rotary Scrap (Before)
• Dieboard Rotary Scrap (After)
• Dieboard Sections (After)
• Dieboard Sections (Before)
• Dieboard StripKnives (After)
• Dieboard StripKnives (Before)

These are configured in Options > Database Installation > Automation.

Rule Preparation

Path markers

To aid in the creation of rule preparation blocks, path markers have been enabled matching the colour of the palette used in the rule preparation block. These can be toggled on within the rule preparation tool at almost every stage.

Inverse Lip End mode

Rule preparation blocks have a new end mode called Inverse Lip. These are very similar to a lip but point inwards rather than out.

These can be set inside the Rule Preparation Block MTS end conditions prior to the creation of the rule or on the fly by modifying the start or end of a generated rule. These are visible in the end condition markers as shown below:

Rule Processing Machine – BB020 Support

There are some enhancements to the mruleset rule processing machine in Impact 2022. Specifically, these are to support the BB020 machine.

The new machine is specified on the Rule Processing Machine page of the Master Tool Settings.

There are also two mruleset versions from which to choose; either mset|rule or mset|rule2. This selection is made on the mruleset page.

The mset|rule02 machine does not require the presser tools to be configured, so these are disabled.

Only mset|rule02 machines support lipped rules, and you can specify here whether your particular machine is capable of outputting lipped rules. Otherwise, they will not be output and will have to be placed manually.

You can also specify a symbol that will be placed to identify any rules that could not be output due to incompatible lips on adjacent rules.