Been playing with the new version of Aspire tonight, loads in it for wood carvers and sign makers but I was interested in looking at the nesting software.

For anyone that doesn't know nesting is quite hard to do and it's only when you get serious software it become possible because of licensing the algorithms that allow this, all the good stuff is patented.

One job I do in quantities are some gears made from Tufnol which is a cloth and resin material similar to Bakelite. They are made from this material as a 'fuse' in the gear train, any jamming and they strip, protects the machine and is good for business

I cut these out of 12mm thick sheet on the router before they go on the gear hobber in quantities of 24 as that sheet fit the router easily with a bit to spare.
The blanks are coded from a CAD file generated to touch blanks and save as much material as possible so I was interested in seeing how Aspire would nest these as I though it would be physically impossible to get more than 24 out of the sheet.
Let Aspire have it's head and it fitted 22 in the same size, not as good as manual but it nested them different to what I had done, because there is some spare sheet i increased the sheet by 10mm and redid it, still 22 but another pattern. Gave it another 10mm to play with and it squeezed 28 onto the sheet for only an increase of 20mm which i can spare and fit on.



So full marks to Aspire for getting me 4 extra gear out of a cut sheet but that's 60 gears out of a full sheet extra.
Given the price of this stuff at just over £560 a sheet that's a big saving.

.