Sometimes machines don't have a physical shear. A downstream system cuts the part. The controller has always stopped for a shear whether there was one or not in order to do all of the bookkeeping that required the material to be stopped. This is annoying to customers and is inefficient.

Sometimes the customer is able to hide the shear operation in some other operation. Sometimes this is not possible or convenient.

Recent changes have allowed the controller to stitch parts by omitting shears without stopping for a shear operation. This gave us the ability to configure the controller, using a setup parameter, to do what has always been referred to as phantom shears. A phantom shear is basically the same as omitting a shear but still counting the part as complete.

A new setup called Phantom Shear Mode has been added to allow a customer to tell us that there is no shear so don't stop for the operation. It has two settings, No and Yes. It defaults to No. When set to Yes, all shears will be treated as Phantom.

Due to competing requirements and business priorities the setup is not available in Continuous Press mode when multiple presses are enabled. In continuous press mode a Phantom Shear will force the press into single stroke mode during the feed that contains the phantom shear. These limitations may be removed in the future when business priorities and time allow.