During the 1980s the board converting industry made a major step forward with the introduction of blanking on the machine. This enabled the converter to fully separate his work before gluing for despatch. Instead of conventionally delivering a cut-and-stripped sheet, the machine will accept upper and lower tooling to separate the nicked blanks, stacking them into the sectioned lower tool.

Arden Dies was the first UK die maker to supply dedicated blanking tools in the mid 1980s through its alliance with Marbach GmbH. In 1990, Arden Dies brought the manufacture of blanking tools in-house to improve response times for a growing market, and to pass on any cost savings to customers. Blanking is now common practice in many conversion companies, with the boundaries being pushed out to blank all feasible layouts.

Advantages

- Better use of manpower - how many people does the company have breaking out cartons? And how much does this cost in wage bills
- Less operations - piles of cut-and-stripped cartons have to be moved to the stripping bay and then sent for gluing or despatch after being broken out.
- Decreased production time - how much time is spent on this operation? This is dependent on the complexity of the job, but could take more man-hours to break cartons out than originally taken to cut/crease them.
- Higher quality cartons - obviously due to the methods used in manually breaking out, a percentage of cartons are often damaged. This can be caused by over nicking to increase machine speeds, or just through poor breakout methods. This may also cause gluing problems with cartons being bent.