Crate Pro 6 r190737 Quick Video for Adjusting your Fastener Counts in Preferences & Inventory

- 3 August 2023 - Watch Video

Once you set your Fastener spacing (shown is inches or mm)  in PREFERENCES for each crate style family, you'll want restrict changes to the Spacing Factor to the individual fasteners in INVENTORY. Changes in PREFERENCES will affect all fasteners that you made available for that location.


The amount of fasteners calculated for use is based:

  • The Spacing Factor for the individual material multiplied by the Fastener Space value in Preferences 
    • Important: Changing the spacing in Preferences will affect ALL fasteners used in that capacity for that style family
  • How that fastener is being applied: cleat fastener, base fastener, assembly fastener and the value in Preferences for that application
  • The dimension of the material fastener is being applied to.. Example: a fastener row is typically applied for each 2 nominal inches ( 50mm) of lumber as its attached to the panel.





Medium-Duty Rub Strips Fastener Rules


Published fastener standards are what is used to determine the number of fasteners being calculated, which you can adjust manually as desired. The standards are based on the old military specs, so you may find more fasteners are being calculated than you typically use. You can set your preferred calculations for each fastener in the Inventory module and in Preferences to better match how you prefer them to be calculated but there are some base rules that will not be affected by your auto settings.

There are a few rules that are not user-modifiable as far as preference settings go:
  • Where two lumber cleats cross each other at a junction. Based on the width of the lumber cleats used, a specific number of fasteners are calculated for each junction no matter what fastener is used. 
  • With lumber, a row of fasteners is assumed for each 2"  of the width of the board.  So for a 2 x 2 board we assume 1 row of fasteners, and for a 2 x4  we assume 2 rows.  The fasteners in each row are offset,  per the standard.. Let's say these boards are the same length, the number of fasteners calculated for the 2x4 will generally be double that of the 2x2. (There are minor variables because the fasteners in each row are not placed side by side but should be offset and a 2x2 is not exactly 2" and a 2x4 is not exactly 4". But you get the idea.)
Medium-duty rub strips have additional rules that don't apply to other configurations. 
  • There will be one or three rub strip segments per skid or stringer. There are no other configurations in the standards for segmented rub strips but you can modify the segment quantities in your design. 

  • There is a minimum of 5 fasteners per segment no matter the length of the segment. Companies may use fewer depending on the type of fastener but as a starting point, we opted to set the code based on the published standard versus making up our own rules. Users can change the quantity in the design

  • After the minimum has been applied, then your 'Final Spacing' value for the specific fastener is taken into account if more fasteners are to be added.  Keep in mind that CP6 already 'sees' that 5 fasteners have been applied when determining additional fasteners. Also in play is the fastener rows count based on the width of the rub strips no matter what fastener is being used.
So you may always have to adjust your fastener count for lower assembly components. At a later date, we can look at providing additional baseline settings for certain fasteners when used in certain positions. However, we can't review this soon because we are working really hard to get CP6 to upgrade on FileMaker Advanced product and that's all consuming.