Working with jobs that require material grain to align with a specific part orientation? Did you know ProNest features an easy to use, easy to program grain restraint feature, immediately accessible when adding parts to the part list?
While grain orientation may not be important when cutting 1 inch (25 mm) thick steel intended to be painted, for other applications, controlling grain direction on parts can be an important factor in nesting. For example, fabricators of stainless steel appliances and architectural facades would find grain orientation critical to their work. As you may expect (from reading previous ProNest articles), at Hypertherm we like to make things as easy as possible for our users. Grain restraint is no different.
Rather than control grain orientation in 90 degree increments (compass points - 0,90,180,270 degrees) as seen in some CAM products, ProNest allows for orientation restraint in one degree increments.
To use the ProNest Grain Restraint feature, which comes standard, when adding a part using ‘Edit Part List’ simply add a value to the ‘Grain Restraint’ data field. By default, a value of 0 is used, meaning ‘free rotation’ is allowed and the nesting operator may use any angle or rotation. An angle of 180 locks grain horizontally, and 90 or 270 work in a similar fashion. Finally, an angle of 360 acts as a total lock on orientation, meaning only the part’s current ‘un-nested’ orientation is observed.
Another useful feature, similar to Grain Restraint, is ‘Initial Rotation’. Initial Rotation allows a part to be rotated when it is added to the part list by defining an initial rotation angle. This rotation will become the part's ‘natural' orientation.
ProNest Grain Restraint and Initial Rotation features….simple to use, intuitive, yet powerful. Learn more about ProNest.
