Base plate
Placeholder: real conversion coming soon Sheet metal fabrication
Drawing to DXF for sheet metal fabrication
Fabrication shops are sent drawings, not profile geometry. Nest Ready reads the customer’s drawing, whether a CAD-exported PDF, a scan or a photo, and returns a DXF of each part’s profile and internal features. Estimating, CAD/CAM programming and production preparation start from geometry instead of a redraw.
No card required. Bring your own drawings.
Why do fabrication shops redraw customer parts?
Because what arrives is a drawing made for people to read, not geometry made for a machine.
A customer drawing carries the part along with everything a person needs to understand it: dimensions, tolerances, notes, centre lines, a border and a title block. Before the part can be costed, programmed or cut, someone has to pull the profile out of all that, or redraw it from the dimensions, and check it. Across a mix of customers, formats and old drawings, that work repeats for every part.
Nest Ready does the pulling out, in around 15 seconds per part on average, and leaves the drawing furniture behind.
What does Nest Ready keep from a customer drawing?
The part, and nothing else on the sheet.
Kept in the DXF
- Outer part profile
- Holes, slots and cut-outs
Left behind
- Dimensions and annotations
- Borders, title blocks and notes
Check every DXF against the drawing before cutting.
Where does Nest Ready help across the shop?
The same DXF serves estimating, programming and production preparation.
| Stage | What it needs | What Nest Ready gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Estimating | The part’s profile and size, to cost material and cutting | A DXF of the part, without waiting for a redraw |
| CAD/CAM programming | Clean, closed contours with the drawing furniture gone | Profile on layer OUTER, holes and cut-outs on INNER, true size in millimetres |
| Production preparation | Confidence the geometry matches the customer’s drawing | Each part beside its drawing in review, with anything uncertain flagged |
How does it fit the way your shop already works?
Drawings go in; DXFs come out for the software you already use.
Drawings come in
From customers, in whatever form they have: a CAD-exported PDF, a scan, or a photo of the drawing.
Upload them in one go
Up to 50 files in a batch, each up to 25 MB, as PDF, JPG or PNG.
Parts are extracted
The outer profile and internal features of each part, with the drawing furniture left behind.
Review what’s flagged
Anything uncertain is flagged for review. Fix small issues, re-run with a note, or reject a part.
Download and carry on
DXFs for your estimating, CAD/CAM and nesting software. Check every DXF against the drawing before cutting.
What doesn’t Nest Ready do for a fabrication shop?
It produces part geometry. It doesn’t replace your CAD/CAM, nesting or estimating tools.
- It doesn’t create flat patterns from 3D models of folded parts.
- It doesn’t produce toolpaths, cutting parameters or machine code, and it doesn’t nest parts.
- It doesn’t produce quotations.
- It works from photos of drawings, not photos of physical parts.
See an example drawing converted
A real Nest Ready conversion of each example drawing below will be shown here, with the DXF and the facts of its run.
Placeholder: real conversion coming soon FAQ
Questions from fabrication shops
What to know before you send in your first drawing.
Does Nest Ready create flat patterns for folded parts?
No. It extracts the part profile as it is drawn on the drawing. It doesn’t unfold 3D models or work out flat patterns for folded parts.
Can the whole team use one account?
Yes. Every paid plan includes unlimited users, so estimators, programmers and production staff can work from the same drawings.
Our customers send all sorts of drawings. Will they all work?
Not always. PDFs, scans, JPG and PNG images, and photos of drawings are all accepted, but pages that can’t be read reliably are refused with the reason and what would fix them, such as rescanning at a higher resolution.
Do we have to review every part before downloading?
No. Anything uncertain is flagged for review. Parts nobody has reviewed still download; when a drawing has several parts, the README in the zip marks them NEEDS REVIEW. Check every DXF against the drawing before cutting.
Your next job starts here.
Bring the drawing. Leave with the part.
Try 25 parts free No card required.