Tag Archives: Nesting

Low Vacuum got your parts moving around?

Vacuum loss while machining is a real problem. Vacuum drops with each pierce and cut. Since the coefficient of friction is based on the area of the part, smaller parts are the most affected. Unfortunately, the lateral force applied only varies by material and feed so what was ok for large parts may not work at all for small parts.

Step one is to ensure that there are no machine vacuum leaks and than the spoilboard edges are seals etc. Here are several strategies that will help with the movement problem. Two of these strategies try to conserver vacuum for when it needed most and the third reduced the force feed.

Option 1: Conserve vacuum by not cutting through the material.

Leave an ‘onion skin’ to reduce the amount of air passing through the spoilboard. Parts hold more firmly. Two passed are required to fully cut the parts. The … Read the rest

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Automatic Nesting Contours

With many facilities using multiple software packages to program/optimize/nest it gets hard to keep track of what parts were actually programed and which were not.

Many shops use Cut Rite for the simple rectangles and WoodWOP for the more complex components.  We see this as the best of both worlds — except that its gets messy keeping the parts straight.  Cut Rite ‘wants’ a file with dimensions or a MRP to load dimensions and WoodWOP definitely wants a program.

ONGAA CAM can now take the tedium out of programming the ‘regular’ rectangles automatically, whether or not you have made allowance for edge banding in the Solidworks parts or not.

With both ‘Edgeband Size Vars’ and ‘Add Nesting Contour’ turned on, ONGAA CAM will automatically create a ‘bounding-box’ contour and associated a Vertical Route process with it.  All process options are configurable including Tool, direction, compensation, approach and even ‘midline start’.… Read the rest

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Nesting interface improvements

The ONGAA CAM nesting interface has been improved to provide easier manual movement of parts as well as allowing renestiong of single sheets (in a multi sheet nests).

USER INTERFACE

The initial view of the nest remains the same with the first 4 sheets displayed.  By double clicking on any sheet a full screen view of the sheet is displayed.  Both the initial 4 sheet and the single sheet now includes the sheet scrap material and also left and right mouse button drag & drop movement.  If the sheet boundary is exceeded both the part and the sheet scrap boundary are highlighted to indicate this.

RENESTING

An option has been added to allow renesting of a single sheet for those times when then nesting strategy works for most sheets but not all.

The renest option also allows you to resize the ‘working area’ of a sheet and/or change the strategy … Read the rest

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ONGAA CAM for Biesse – Nesting module is now available

With the release of 1.3.12 of ONGAA CAM for Biesse, the optional nesting module is now available.

The Nesting Option provides the ability to nest complete assemblies at one time. Nesting features include 8 fill/nest options auto nesting, grain alignment, manual moves after auto nesting, tool change / free motion optimization and automatic sheet splitting based on named material and material thickness.  Up to 99 sheets can be nested at one time.  When sheet splitting is used, each material ‘sheet size’ can be selected from a sheet library.

Different options can be tried while in preview and once satisfied the layouts can be ‘Accepted’.  Printed layout sheets are also available.

A nested program is created for each sheet as a standard BPP program.  This allows the operator to make ‘on the shop floor’ changes without the need to regenerate the files etc.  This is particularly useful when tools need to … Read the rest

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Nesting – Automatic separation of parts based on thickness and material

The earlier version of the nesting functions of ONGAA CAM assumed each nesting run would be for one thickness of material and it was up to the programmer to ensure parts were grouped by material and thickness.

Based on valuable customer feedback we have changed this.

As of version 1.3.26.0, ONGAA CAM can now determine if a part belongs to a nesting group based on work piece definition parameter ‘Thickness’ and on a new parameter called (Material).  Each Nested MPR created will also have a comment added which will indicate the material and the thickness used for nesting.  As before, each ‘Nested MPR’ is still a 100% compliant MPR meaning that individual processes can still be adjusted at the console.

Since material is often defines as a Custom Property within SOLIDWORKS, we have added the ability to reference the custom property name in the work piece definition.

This feature makes … Read the rest

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True shape nesting with ONGAA CAM

 

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Automatic Nesting

Several automatic nesting strategies are available in ONGAA CAM which provide a quick and easy way to nest rectangular parts across many sheets of material (directly from SOLIDWORKS).   ONGAA CAM optimizes the nest to both maximize material usage as well as minimize tool changes.

But not all part are created equally.  Automated nesting assumes the required material is as defined in the work piece definition of WoodWOP.   Odd shapes would waste both material and time.

 

Manual Nesting – ‘Nudging’

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With the latest version on ONGAA CAM, manual nesting or ‘Nudging’ is now available.

Parts can now be selected, moved between sheets, moved on a sheet as well as rotated using intuitive button controls or keystrokes.

 

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Unlike some other nesting solutions, ONGAA CAM goes not produce one continuous toolpath / process.

The resulting ‘Nested MPR’ shown here in WoopWOP 5 still produces … Read the rest

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SOLIDWORKS-WoodWOP Nesting optimization with ONGAA CAM

Optimizing Processes and Optimizing MPRs

Nesting – or combining multiple parts onto one sheet is a vital function for ‘Flat Table’ operators.

Until now, ONGAA CAM‘s ability to nest ‘complete assemblies’ has been received with both enthusiasm and a little reservation.

Users have ‘enthusiastically’ created all kinds of assemblies in SOLIDWORKS, combining nested assemblies, parts with multiple configurations and ONGAA CAM has created multiple sheet MPRs without a hitch.

Then came the next requests for improvements …

  • How do I optimize the the processes? — the generated nested MPR made one part at a time — I want the number of tool changes to be reduced.
  • I have a big assembly, how do I do more than 4 sheets.
  • How do I tell ‘what part is what’ when looking at the nesting preview.
  • How do I print the nest layout (with parts listed) so the ‘guys on the floor’
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Nesting – Improvement and Optimizations

Since nesting is all about ‘optimizing’, we took another look at optimizing the nesting process to see where we could improve upon what we had.

Step 1, has not changed.  From an assembly click ‘Gen, Nested MPR’Start_nest

With a single click, all ‘unsuppressed’ parts of the assembly will be listed, sized and initially laid out on as many sheets as it takes and that layout displayed.

The nesting process will take a ‘configured’ sheet size – width, length and thickness as well as a perimeter scrap dimension ans apply these while arranging the parts.

Grain orientation of part and board was available in the previous release as were the numerous layout options and these remain the same.

 

Step 2, Adjusting the layout options has new features added to help the process.Main_nest_panel

The first is a quick reset of the sheet thickness based on the thickness of the parts.  If … Read the rest

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