Nesting for electroforged grating
Automated grating nesting that pays for itself
The only nesting engine built for electroforged grating.
On an electroforged grating (EFG) order, raw material is the biggest cost you carry — and nesting is the step that decides how much of it you keep. It plans how the pieces on the order are cut from standard grating panels, and with it, how much of every panel leaves the yard as product instead of offcut. Flocra plans that cut for best yield automatically, inside the same system that already holds the order.
One
industry, one problem — built for a working grating factory
Planned by hand vs planned by Flocra
The same six pieces, the same order
Planned by hand: two panels consumed, scrap in both.
Planned by Flocra: the pieces pair up across the width to fit one panel — the end strip is never cut, and everything saved goes back to stock as margin.
What it gets you
- More grating out of every panel — the engine pairs pieces across the panel width so an end strip is never cut at all. Fewer panels bought for the same order.
- Hours of planning back — laying out a mixed order by hand is a morning’s work for an experienced planner. Here it runs while you watch.
- Nothing to re-draw — the plan only ever proposes what your factory can actually make, so it goes to the saw as issued.
- No third-party software — cutting plans come from Flocra’s own engine, fed directly by the order’s bill of materials. No exports, no re-entry, no separate licence to buy.
- Savings you can see — saved material is tracked back to stock, and its effect on the order’s margin shows up in reports and dashboards.
The saving doesn’t stop at planning
A morning of planning back is worth having. But the plan you issue also sets the work on the floor for the rest of the job — how many panels get handled, how many cuts the saw makes, how much welding fabrication picks up afterwards. One layout decision moves all three, and the plan puts a number on each before the job is released.
- Fewer panels to handle — every panel not taken off the stack is a lift, a set-up and a forging hold that never happens. Fewer panels for the same order is less material and less handling, out of the same decision.
- Fewer cuts — pairing pieces across the width removes whole cuts, not just millimetres. The plan reports how many cuts the job takes and how much length runs through the saw.
- Less welding after the saw — when an ordered width does not land on the pitch grid, fabrication has to hand-weld load bars to close the gap. The engine knows which widths need them, counts them, and prefers the layouts that need fewer.
- Fewer pieces split and rejoined — a piece too wide for a panel has to be split and put back together downstream. Each one is flagged on the plan, so the fabrication load is known up front rather than discovered mid-shift.
Know what to order
What comes out of nesting is the panel schedule — width, span and quantity, by specification. That output is also the purchase list. Once the panels are fixed, the load bar and cross bar they consume falls straight out of it, by size and quantity, before anything is forged or cut.
- Ordered to the actual layout — not a rule of thumb, not last job’s figure. What the plan consumes is what you buy.
- No over-purchase — bar stock bought against a rough estimate sits in the yard as trapped cash.
- No shortfall — the costlier mistake of the two. A job that stops halfway waiting on bar costs more than the bar.
Why grating nesting is its own problem
An electroforged panel is not a plate. It is a welded lattice — load bars running along the span, cross rods pressed through them under high current and pressure. That structure takes away the two things general-purpose nesting software relies on: it cannot rotate a piece, and it cannot treat width as a continuous dimension.
| General-purpose nesting | Flocra grating nesting | |
|---|---|---|
| Input | DXF or DWG geometry exported from CAD | The order’s own bill of materials — no export, no re-entry |
| Rotation | Parts spin freely to fit — the main packing lever | Never rotated. Load bars run along the span and carry the load — a turned piece is scrap, not a saving |
| Widths | Continuous — any dimension can be packed | Only on the load-bar pitch grid, because an off-grid width is not something the factory can produce |
| Gap between pieces | Saw, torch or laser kerf | The pitch gap between gratings — set by the pitch, and wide enough to absorb the cutting tolerance |
| Stock | Choose a sheet size, work in remnants | Panel span is fixed by the stock you can buy; width is the only free axis |
| Method | Heuristic packing — the first layout that fits | Searched, not guessed — the layout is optimised as a whole, not filled piece by piece |
What the engine knows that a general nester doesn’t
- The pitch grid is real — grating widths exist only at whole numbers of load-bar pitches plus one bar thickness. A plan that ignores it comes back from the shop floor to be re-drawn; every width Flocra proposes is one you can actually cut.
- The gap between gratings is a pitch, not a kerf — when two pieces sit side by side across the panel width, what separates them is set by the pitch. Get that one dimension wrong and you invent slack the factory never cuts, quietly wasting a strip on every panel you make.
- The span is not negotiable — stock arrives in fixed lengths and the saw works to them. Treating span as a free variable produces layouts that look better on screen and cannot be bought.
- Frame bars change the cut — the finished grating and the piece coming off the saw are not the same size once the frame-bar allowance comes off the span. Miss it and every piece in the batch is long by twice the frame-bar thickness.
- Combining beats filling — in grating the gain comes from pairing pieces across the width so an end strip is never cut, not from squeezing shapes into leftover corners. It is a different objective, and it is the one Flocra optimises for.
We went looking for the competition
The market scan
Search for nesting software and you will find genuinely excellent tools — true-shape nesters for laser, plasma and waterjet plate; panel optimizers for wood and board; length optimizers for structural sections and bar. Every one of them treats width as a number you are free to choose. Then search for one that knows a grating width lands only on the pitch — that at 30 mm pitch you can make 963 mm and you cannot make 950 mm — and the results run out.
Grating manufacturers have been served by general tools plus a spreadsheet plus an experienced planner. Flocra was built for this one problem, by people solving it for a working grating factory.
Frequently asked questions
What is nesting in electroforged grating manufacturing?
Nesting is the planning step that decides how the pieces on an order are cut from standard electroforged grating panels. Because raw material is the largest cost on a grating order, the layout chosen at this step decides how much of each panel becomes product and how much becomes offcut.
How is grating nesting different from sheet metal nesting?
Sheet metal nesting is a geometry problem: arbitrary shapes are rotated and packed onto a plate, with a saw or torch kerf between them. Grating nesting is a manufacturing-structure problem. A grating panel is a welded lattice of load bars and cross rods, so pieces cannot be rotated, widths exist only on the load-bar pitch grid, and the gap between two side-by-side pieces is set by the pitch rather than by a kerf. A general-purpose nester will happily produce a layout the factory cannot build.
Can I use general-purpose nesting software for steel bar grating?
You can run it, but its output has to be corrected by hand. General nesters treat width as a continuous dimension and rotation as their main packing lever. In electroforged grating neither holds: an off-grid width is not manufacturable, and rotating a piece puts the load bars across the span instead of along it. The corrections undo most of the optimisation the tool performed.
Does Flocra need a CAD or DXF file to nest?
No. Nesting reads the order’s own bill of materials, which was already built when the product was configured and quoted. There is no export from CAD, no import step and no re-entry of dimensions.
How much material does automated nesting save?
It depends entirely on the mix of piece widths and spans on the order — a run of similar pieces nests tightly by hand, while a varied order is where automatic planning gains the most. Flocra reports the yield and the panel count for every plan, so the saving on your orders is a measured figure rather than an estimate.
Does nesting only save material, or manufacturing time as well?
Both. Material is the largest single line, but the same layout decision sets the work that follows it: how many panels are handled, how many cuts the saw makes, how many load bars fabrication must hand-weld to reach an off-grid width, and how many pieces have to be split and rejoined. Flocra counts each of these on the plan, so the manufacturing load is known before the job is released rather than absorbed as it happens.
Does the plan tell me what raw material to buy?
Yes. The plan decides exactly what the order consumes, so it doubles as the purchase list — load bars and cross bars, by size and quantity. Ordering against the layout rather than a rule of thumb avoids both surplus bar stock sitting in the yard and a job stopping halfway for material that was never ordered.
Does the plan account for frame bars, toe plates and banding?
Yes. Cut dimensions are derived from the finished grating with the frame-bar allowance already deducted along the span, and the downstream banding, toe-plate and galvanizing steps take their quantities from the same plan.
Part of the order journey
Nesting takes its input from the quote’s own configured bill of materials and hands its output to production — one of the steps the engineer-to-order platform runs from a single manual entry.
See Flocra in action →