Grain On/Off

[Rob Davis]

I promise this is the last time I will push this as maybe it is harder than I gather:
The biggest cost saver Thermwood could do for me is to allow selected parts of a cabinet to be made with Grain direction in whichever way it makes the most efficient use of material. We just finished a job and I manually went back and changed grain directions on parts just to see how much I could save and I could have saved 3 sheets on a 19 sheet job!
What I want is the ability to allow toe kicks, stretchers, some backs of cabinets, tops of narrow wall cabinets, etc to be allowed to be nested and cut in any direction that fully utilizes the material. I don't care if the grain is vertical, horizontal or at 45 degrees on a toe kick. But I do care if I have to use an extra sheet because it is forcing the toe kick grain a certain way. Then I am tossing out parts of other sheets and having to use additional ones to make parts that I don't care which way they go. If I figure 3 sheets and $35 per sheet, there's $100 extra profit I could have made on that one job.
What I envision is a check box on Construciton Options screeen that allows me to "fix" or "ignore" grain with default at "fix". I have tried to re-apply the components I don't care about using a different material set up with no grain but that kind of defeats the purpose as it still tosses offals that could have been used.
Please consider this for future "improvements".

Don't get me wrong, Thermwood has revolutionized our company and we are totally sold on them. Just suggesting a practical improvemtn that gives us real money versus some of the more intangible things.

[Bryan J Tanner]

couldn't you create a sheet stock that didn't have grain?

Our cabinets are build out of white melamine and they get nested in any direction as I didn't select grained in the materials database.

[Nat Wheatley]

I agree 100% that is would be a great/useful feature.

[Rob Davis]

Bryan,
That is what I did at one point and it works for those parts. But when you run a whole job what happens is that these parts nest as separate sheets since different material and it doesn't use the offals made from cutting the other parts. I want it to use the unused portions of sheets already on the machine without adding another material, etc. It would save the extra sheets and not generate all those smaller offal chunks to use later and try to hold down on a table.
Rob