On a tile machine the material must have forming steps placed in it in order for the material to feed all the way through the forming presses through the shear.

Scrap pieces, like a test part, have never had a pattern applied to them. This made the Test part feature, added after the fact, useless on a Tile Machine.

The Coil Trim Cut feature was always intended to cut a small strip off of the leading edge of the first part after a coil change, it was never intended to be large enough to require a Tile Step. However, we have discovered that the first several feet of a newly threaded coil on some Tile Machines have some wavy visual defects in them. On these machines they prefer that the Coil Trim Cut feature remove this first few feet. The length of the scrap piece requires it to have forming steps to make it all the way through the presses.

The solution to both problems was to modify our current part calculation and part queueing functions to accept override parameters that specify the length and type of part that is being dealt with.

To prevent issues on legacy installations a new setup parameter called Coil Trim Cut Mode was added to the XL270. It has two settings, No Steps and With Steps. The setting defaults to No Steps. Customers who want to use longer Coil Trim Cuts can select the With Steps option so that their Coil Trim Cut parts will have steps.

In both cases, Test Part and Coil Trim Cut, the pattern that defines the steps comes from the item currently being filled into the part queue.

The combination of part length, tool locations and the size of the formed step can result in some part lengths that cannot be produced without part damage that comes from a step forming process that draws a previously formed step backwards into the lower shear blade. The controller has run time code that tests for this condition. in the case of a Coil Trim Cut or Test part it may not be obvious that it is not the programmed part length that is at fault. For this reason two new error messages were added, one for Test Part and One for Coil Trim Cut. The Errors are Coil Trim Cut Failure and Test Part Failure. Both errors have instructions to reference the prior error message for the cause. For cases when the part length is causing a problem it is hoped that the user will understand that it is the Test Part or Coil Trim Cut length that is at fault rather than the part length in the programmed items.