A drawing from a furniture program depicts the product, not the drilling: the minifix cup is there, the dowel hole for it is not. The import builds such holes itself: it finds the joints between parts and takes the sizes from the hardware reference.
A fastener joins two parts
Almost every fastener works with a pair of parts rather than one. So every joint has two roles:
- The host part is the one the fastener lives in: for a minifix it is the one with the cup, for a confirmat the one it passes through, for a hinge the front.
- The mating part is the one it fastens to. It may be absent altogether.
Three kinds of joint
- Edge to face — the edge of one part against the face of another. Confirmat, minifix, rafix, dowel. The most common carcass joint.
- Face to face — two faces side by side. A hinge (front and side panel), surface-mounted plates.
- Single fixing — there is no mating part: shelf support, leg, handle.
The kind of joint is not a decorative label. It decides what the offset is measured from: for edge-to-face it is the plane of the joint, that is the middle of the mating part’s edge, and for face-to-face it is the front face. The real thicknesses of both parts are used.
A rule is cancelled in one case: when it is unclear which parts the fastener joins. Three parts meet at a corner, and a hole drilled into “the nearest one, at a guess” only shows up at the machine.
If the parts are known but the kind of joint cannot be recognised, the rule still applies. Only rules whose kind of joint is stated explicitly and does not match the recognised one are dropped. The import from the 3D designer does not check the kind of joint at all: the parser takes the nearest body and applies the rule by the fastener name. If a hole ended up in the wrong place, correct it in the table on the import page.
Where the hole dimensions come from
The sources apply in turn, and each one may override the previous:
- the geometry of the block in the drawing itself;
- rules learned from drawing-and-project pairs;
- the common drilling reference;
- an edit made by your firm;
- an edit made for a particular customer.
“May” is not “must” — but neither is it “never”. The “replace” flag decides whether the rule supersedes the drawing geometry outright. Without it the rule still has an effect: holes from the drawing that sit far from the expected places are dropped, and if the drawing produced no holes at all, the rule places them itself. The reference, in turn, fills in a diameter only where there is none of its own: one given in the drawing it leaves alone.
The reference is shared by everyone while a firm may use different fasteners — that is what the edits are for. They are kept in a table on the import page, separately for each source of projects.
Name synonyms
The same fastener is named differently in different files. So that you do not have to create a rule for every spelling, a rule carries a list of synonyms.
- Against the shared reference the synonyms accumulate: adding your own name does not lose the ones already there.
- A customer edit, however, replaces the firm edit entirely, together with its synonyms and holes. If the firm has its own rule and the customer only needs one more name, list the firm values in the customer edit as well.
- A rule that only carries synonyms and has no holes of its own does not cancel the drilling — it merely adds names.