Searching for materials in groups

[Mark McCallum]

I have quite a few materials.
In ecabs materials might be separated into different sheet sizes for ordering , 5 to 10 or more different materials with different colours, grain, tool breakthrough,tool speeds, thicknesses and to suit KD fittings etc.
The reason for having these materials is to have different settings in groups and tooling to adjust for different kd fittings or to force the selection of tools in a particular order to achieve the desired result.

If the material is not in a group it uses default which selects the best / most suitable tools from all the loaded tool holders.

The job, materials and hole patterns are set up in Ecabs and sent to the machine,
When it hits the machine the uninformed operator, or probably forgetful me........, has no idea or forgotten that we have to set tooling and materials for a particular reason and just blithely flicks past the check tooling and graph screens and then wonders why we are machining pockets with a 1/8" tool or using a 10mm cutter to do a small detailed pocket.
So part of my question is when loading a job is there a way to easily check whether a material is already in a tooling group, without scrolling through tool groups, or can control nesting advise that it is using the generic group because the material is not in a group?

I notice I also seem to be able to add the same named material into different tooling groups?

Any tips appreciated
Thanks
Mark

PS. It would be a nice feature if job notes could be attached in ecabs and loaded to be read before/ nesting.

[Clint Buechlein]

Mark,

As long as you are on at least version 6.12 of Control Nesting, after loading a job if you go to Settings, the drop down for groups will only show the groups being used in the job (unless the Show All box is checked). If you nest the job and go to Settings, the group for the currently displayed sheet will be the only one shown. If you use the CNC Report, it also shows the groups used for each material in the report.

Control Nesting doesn't currently recognize materials being in multiple groups. There is likely a potential and I'll pass it along to the software engineers. Notes for eCabinets have been talked about in the past and added to the wishlist previously.

-Clint-