A material family is a grouping of grades within PrimecutNE's costing data. See also Using Material Aliases.
In the costing data and elsewhere families are indicated by their bold italic font:
There are 2 families already set up in the Tutorials Database. The Mild Steel family contains 3 grades:
Using a material family specification on parts which do not need to be cut from a specific grade allows for flexibility on what plates the part can be nested on. In these cases families can be created consisting of those suitable or acceptable grades; for example "mild steel family" might include GR250, GR300 and GR350. A part specified as "mild steel family-10mm" could be thus cut from a GR20-10mm plate, a GR300-10mm plate or a GR350-10mm plate.
Note that while parts can be assigned material families as their grade, plates can not. A plate is a physical object ordered with a specific grade, and thus the specific grade should be know.
Grade Override
When manual nesting, it is possible to force a part of a different grade onto a plate, even if the plate grade and part grade, or material family, ar incompatible. For example a GR400 part can be manually nested onto a GR250 plate by dragging it onto the plate, however you will be prompted that the grades do not match and to confirm that this is really required. The Check Grades button in the nesting editor checks all parts are compatible and will highlight any that have been forced.
See Also