The next morning, he found his father already at the CNC router, the new sheet clamped down. “What’s this?” Ramesh asked, pointing to the machine’s pendant. “I haven’t drawn the lines.”
In the fluorescent-lit workshop of his family’s custom furniture business, Arjun stared at a half-ton sheet of Baltic birch plywood. Beside it lay a hand-drawn layout of chair parts—backrests, legs, armrests—scribbled on a napkin. His father, Ramesh, had done it that way for forty years: eyeball the grain, trace the templates, and hope the offcuts would fit another project.
“We’re wasting a fifth of every sheet,” Arjun said, tapping the napkin. “At this scale, that’s our profit margin.”
Arjun ran the simulation twice more, each time tighter. He saved the G-code.