Steel Grating Takeoff Software
Upload grating layouts, schedules, and fabrication details. Aginera extracts panel marks, sizes and areas — plus the toe plates, nosings, clips and support angles that manual take-offs routinely miss.
The accessory scope is where grating bids go wrong
Counting grating panels is the easy part. What costs fabricators margin is everything around the panel — the toe plate on three edges, the nosing on the stair treads, the clips at four per panel, the banding on every cut opening. It is spread across layout sheets and detail sheets, and it is exactly the scope a tired estimator marks up last.
Then there is the mark-matching problem. A panel called GP-14 on the layout appears as a row in the schedule and again in a fabrication detail, sometimes with a different size convention on each. Reconciling that by hand across a 40-sheet package is slow, and getting it wrong means either a shortfall in the shop or paid-for steel that never ships.
Aginera reads all three sheet types as one package, keeps the fabricator's own marks intact, and produces a single BOM with every line traceable back to the sheet it came from.
What Aginera extracts from grating drawings
The full fabrication package — not just the panels.
Grating Panels
Panel marks, panel sizes, per-panel and total area, panel type and bearing bar spec where stated on the drawing
Edge Treatment
Toe plates, kick plates, nosings, banding plates, binding bars — the scope most often left off a manual take-off
Fixings & Accessories
Grating clips, fasteners, lift bars, grating handles — counted per panel and aggregated across the set
Supports
Support angles and embed angles the panels bear on, with linear quantities where the layout defines runs
Stair & Walkway Scope
Stair tread grating, steel stair shop drawings, landings, and handrail shop drawings read as adjacent scope
Misc Metals
General misc-metals details picked up alongside grating so the fabrication package is quantified as one BOM
Three sheet types, three extraction strategies
Grating schedules
Structured tables of mark, size and quantity. These extract most reliably — the parser reads rows directly rather than inferring them, so a schedule sheet is expected to yield rows and an empty result is treated as a failure to investigate, not a valid answer.
Grating layout plans
Where panels are physically placed and marked. Harder: marks sit among dimension strings, section callouts and grid lines. Aginera reads the placement and reconciles it against the schedule so a panel that appears in one and not the other is surfaced rather than silently reconciled away.
Fabrication details
Where the edge treatment and fixing scope is defined — banding, binding bars, clip type and spacing, support angle sizes. This is the scope that drives the accessory BOM, and reading it is what separates a panel count from a fabrication take-off.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Aginera extract from steel grating drawings?
Grating panels with their mark, size and area, plus the accessory scope that usually gets missed: toe plates, kick plates, nosings, lift bars, grating handles, clips and fasteners, banding plates, binding bars, stair tread grating, and the support and embed angles the panels sit on. Each line carries the mark it came from and the sheet it was read on.
Which grating drawing types does it handle?
Three distinct sheet types, each with its own extraction logic: grating layout plans (where panels are placed and marked), grating schedules (tabulated mark, size and quantity data), and fabrication detail sheets (where the accessory and edge treatment scope is defined). It also reads adjacent misc-metals scope — steel stair shop drawings, handrail shop drawings, and general misc metals details.
How does it handle panel marks and dimensions?
Marks are read as the fabricator wrote them rather than normalised into a house convention, because the mark is how the shop tracks the panel. Dimensions are parsed from the schedule where a schedule exists and from the detail callouts where it does not. Panels listed as "size various" or dimensioned only on the layout are flagged for review rather than silently dropped — an omitted panel is far more expensive than a queried one.
Does it produce weights or areas?
Both, where the drawing supports it. Grating is quantified in area (SQM) and, when the bearing bar spec and panel type are stated on the drawing, converted to weight (KG). Where the drawing does not state enough to compute a weight, Aginera reports the area and flags the missing spec instead of assuming a bar size.
Is it accurate enough to bid from?
It is built to be reviewed, not trusted blindly. Every extracted line references the sheet and the mark it came from, so checking a quantity is a targeted look rather than a recount. Grating schedules — being structured tables — extract far more reliably than dense layout sheets where panel marks overlap dimension strings. Treat the output as a populated first pass that an estimator corrects, which is still dramatically faster than marking up a set by hand.
Can it read scanned or PDF-converted drawings?
Yes. Vector PDFs extract most reliably. Scanned and raster sets, and PDFs exported from DWG, are processed through the vision pipeline — recall is lower on poor scans, and Aginera flags sheets where it could not read the text layer rather than reporting a confident zero.
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