As you work with the Cabinet/Assembly Editor and certain aspects of Custom Layout, you will be asked to specify what material certain components are made from. The choices you are offered in each of these areas come from Define Stock Materials right here in Settings/Preferences. When manufacturing reports are generated, material requirements are determined by type of material. The system will add up all the parts made from a particular material and tell you how much of that material you need.
There are several types of material that are each handled differently in the software.
- Countertop Stock is used for adding countertops to cabinets when laying out a kitchen in Custom Layout. In the current version of the software this material is only used to display the countertop and the cost calculation and cut listing of the material is not yet supported.
- Banding Stock is used to put edge banding on a cabinet part, slab door or slab drawer front. The system will track the amount of banding of each type needed for a job and display this in the Cut List.
- Sheet Stock is used to make cabinet parts. This is the material that the nesting feature works with. Parts made from sheet stock are nested on the sheet sizes specified here. If you need to nest parts on solid wood boards, you need to enter them as sheet stock (using the actual board dimensions) so parts can be nested on them. This is common when making drawer boxes from solid wood.
- Board Stock is primarily used for face frames but can also be used to make miscellaneous parts using the Display Board feature.
Some generic materials are already defined in the software. The seed “Standard” cabinets are made from these materials. You can start working with the software without defining additional material, but you will need to add your particular material before you can begin doing serious work.
The Image selected when you define a material is the texture used to display all parts made from that material. If you change the image here, it will change for all cabinets that use this material.
If you are going to use the same actual material but finish it differently, you have a couple of choices. If an entire Job will have the new finish and it will be processed as a Job, you could create a new material with the same parameters except the Image. In this case, the system will nest together all parts made from this new material.
If you have cabinets with different finishes in the same Job and you want to nest all the parts together, the only way to handle it currently is to use different materials, each with their own image, to display the layout and then change material so they are all the same before generating the manufacturing output. The software offers a function that allows you to change material in the Custom Layout area rather easily.
Board Stock is the material used for face frames. Board Stock is given an Image here and this Image is used to display the face frames unless you check Common with Door under Display Finish on page 2 in the Face Frame area of Construction Settings. These are found in the Cabinet/Assembly Editor and these selections are made when the cabinet design is being developed. If it is checked, the face frame will be displayed with the same Image used for the doors instead of the Image selected here. Thus, using this setting you can have face frames with the same finish as the doors or with a different finish.
Banding Stock is always displayed with the Image selected here.
Banding Stock is used whenever edge banding is needed. Edge banding is applied to cabinet parts in the Edge Banding Editor and is applied to slab doors when they are defined in the Door/Drawer Editor. In each case, the underlying part is reduced in size to allow for the thickness of the edge banding, resulting in a part that is the proper overall size after the edge banding has been applied.
To create a part where the banding stock is the same texture as the part itself requires that the Banding Stock defined here be given the same texture as the part.
The ability to put a different texture on the Banding Stock than the part opens some interesting possibilities. You can define a relatively thick edge band which is more of an edge frame. This could be textured differently, creating an interesting design. This can be especially useful when building slab doors and drawer fronts.
It is important that the price be properly input when defining material, paying attention to the unit you are pricing.
Sheet Stock is priced Per Sheet.
Board Stock and Banding Stock are priced Per LINEAL Foot. Note that this is NOT per board foot but per LINEAL foot. You will find more detail about inputting material pricing in the section “Setting Up for Cost Estimating”.