Mastering Part Spacing in CABINET VISION: A Step-By-Step Guide to Precision and Efficiency

Modifying Clearance and Spacing in CABINET VISION

G’day, it’s Clayton from Planit Canada. Today let’s talk a little bit about how we can modify and control the clearance or spacing between our parts when we are optimizing them for our CNC machine. We’ll talk briefly about how we can change our machine settings to create a consistent gap between our parts, but then we’ll also see how we can use a special parameter in CABINET VISION to control very specific gaps with specific edges too.

So you can see I have my optimization at the moment in front of us, just about ready for the CNC machine. But before I cut it, I would like to increase the spacing between all of my parts on the sheet. To do that is very simple. I can click Return, Machine, and then here from my Machine settings under Output, I’m going to scroll down till I see the margin part spacing, just here.

With these three settings, I can control the distance between my parts. If I wanted to, I could add… Let’s just, for the sake of demonstration, put in 5 mm. So I could put a 5 mm gap between all of my parts, so that when I close that and reoptimize it, now that consistent gap will be visible. Like so.

But you might have noticed that I also have this back dado on my tops. Perhaps, just for this operation, for example, I would like to add an extra 3 mm on top of the 5 mm clearances already there. Well, I can set that up in CABINET VISION very simply with a parameter that I attached to my tops.

If I wanted to increase this space here, and just for this edge, I’m going to click on Elevation. I’m going to click on Help and Help Topics. And then under System Parameters, this is a big long list of all of the parameters that exist in CABINET VISION. The parameter that we want to attach to our top to control that space is this one here: the _EDGnNPC parameter.

This parameter, when we attach it to a part, specifies a nested part clearance for the edge of that part that we choose to. You can see that there is a little n in italics in the middle of this parameter here. We’re just going to substitute this n for the number of the edge that we would like to add this measurement to—this clearance to.

So, knowing that, we’re going to minimize this window. Let’s double click on this cabinet here. I’m going to click on the top, right-click Properties. And then under Parameters, I’m going to add that parameter we’ve just looked at. So we’re going to click Add, _EDG for Edge, now I want to add the clearance, or the extra 3 mm to the fourth edge on this top, so I’m going to put 4 NPC (_EDG4NPC) and then I can choose the value that I would like to add. So let’s add the 3 mm here. And we’ll click OK, OK.

Now if I go back to S2M Center and renest these parts, I’ll be able to see an 8 mm gap on this top between it and the next part. So I’ve just renested this sheet, and if I click on Measure and measure the gap between this top and the next part, I can see I’ve got now an 8 mm vertical gap. Exactly what we were after.

But the problem I might have now is that I’ve only added this parameter to this cabinet. So, this parameter will work a treat if you just want to modify the space on a unique cabinet that you wanted to add this parameter to, perhaps for just a special job. But if we wanted to see this added to our upper tops for the future, if I click on Elevation, I could right-click on the cabinet that already has this parameter here and save it to my catalog with this attribute box ticked.

So that now every time I grab this upper cabinet, it’s going to give me an extra 3 mm. But, I’m going to potentially switch between different construction methods, depending on the kind of work I’m doing, so maybe I don’t want this parameter to be automatically added to my upper cabinets.

What I could do instead of adding it every single time to the same cabinet is to create a very simple UCS that will add this parameter to all of my upper tops whenever I use a specific construction method.

So why don’t we do that together? If I click on Utilities, User Created Standards, and then if I click on New, I’m going to get this little UCS wizard pop up so I can follow the prompts and it will help create the bones of this UCS for me.

Let’s say I wanted to do Test Top Clearance. In this case, I’m not adding anything but I’m modifying my tops or the parameters for my tops. I’m going to click Modify, and I’m going to scroll down under my part category to find Tops, here. Now if I click Next, I know that in this instance I’m just going to want to add it to my upper cabinets.

So I’m going to scroll down till I find Upper. And I can be even more specific with this UCS wizard, but for the time being, that’s okay. I could attach it depending on the particular cabinet name attached to this UCS, but that’s okay, we’ll skip through that.

And here I can link this parameter to all of my upper cabinets, all of my tops in my upper cabinets that are using the Blind Dado Test construction method, for example. So we’ll click on Next, Next, Next, that’s all good. We didn’t need to change any of those parameters, so we can click Finish.

And now if I click on the code, you’ll see that I’ve got this very simple UCS nearly done. 99% of the work is already done for us. For each of my tops, if they are part of an upper cabinet and this upper cabinet is using the Blind Dado Test construction method, then I can say you need to use or add this parameter: _EDG4NPC = 3mm.

Very simple, but now every single time these conditions are met, CABINET VISION is going to add this attribute. So I can close this, save it, and then click Return.

Now, theoretically, I should be able to click on either of these upper cabinets and see that parameter automatically added to them. If I double click on this upper cabinet and top, and then right-click Properties, we can see under Parameters the _EDG4NPC is there.

Of course, if we wanted to add that clearance to other edges, we could do the exact same thing but just change the value in this center here. If I wanted to add this clearance to the first edge I put 1, the second edge I put 2, the third edge I put 3, etc.

But, the UCS has done exactly what we’ve asked it to do. So now if I click Return and Return and renest these parts one more time, I should now see a consistent gap between all of these tops and the next part adding the 3 mm.

So I finished renesting these parts, and you can see now that just on this fourth edge, on just my upper tops, I am getting a consistent 8 mm clearance, which is adding the 3 mm to the 5 mm clearance that was already there.

That’s a very handy tool to have at your disposal and can help you become a CABINET VISION Power User. Hey, thanks so much for watching. If you’d like to see more tutorials like this one, please be sure to like and subscribe. You can also check out our other videos that will help guide you on your path to becoming a CABINET VISION Power User.