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:
There are 2 main uses for material families:
1.Using a family specification on parts which do not need to be cut from a specific grade
2.Grouping grades with similar Drilling and Milling costing data to reduce the volume of costing data required
1) Using Material Families as the Grade Specifier for Parts
Often a part is ordered whose specific grade is not critical, or which is know to be suitable to a specified range of grades. 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.
2) Grouping grades with similar Drilling and Milling Properties
It can be time consuming populating a large list of spindle tools across a large number of grades. There are tools to assist with this, for example you can select a material in costing mode, then choose Copy to launch the copy to materials dialog, and from here you can copy spindle data to multiple other grades at once. However having multiple copies of the same data generally makes maintaining that data difficult... it is easy to make a change to one grade and forget to copy or otherwise apply it to similr grades.
A recently introduce solution has bee to allow Spindle Costing data to be set against a material family. When looking up costing data, the specific grade will be checked first, and if not matched there families containing that grade will be searched. If more than one family match is found (a grade can be part of multiple families) then the one with highest feedrate is chosen.
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