On a ceiling job the decision everybody remembers is "timber baffles, warm oak, running the long way". Everything after that gets called detail: which profile, how deep the piece is, what happens at the cut end, whether it is perforated, whether there is anything behind the face. Those details are most of the difference between two quotes for the same ceiling and all of the difference between a ceiling that works acoustically and one that only looks as if it should. In module 01 of AxisMod, the ceiling baffle configurator, they sit on the same screen as the layout and get priced the moment they are picked.
The standing caveat from this series applies here too. The module is a demonstrator: it computes end to end, but on a demo catalogue with indicative rates, and I have not quoted a live ceiling through it. The mechanism is the part worth writing about.
What "timber baffles" leaves open
Seen from the floor, four quite different products look nearly the same. What separates them is what the workshop has to buy and do.
- The profile. A solid plank, a folded box, an open section, a slatted or rounded piece, a felt baffle. Same rhythm on the ceiling, different material volume, different weight hanging off the soffit, different price per piece.
- The section of the piece. Width and depth change how the ceiling reads from below and how much surface is actually facing the room. Two ceilings that photograph identically can be a long way apart on both cost and acoustic performance.
- The edge. Square, rounded, bevelled, chamfered. On a drawing that is a style note. In the workshop it is a machining pass on every running metre of every piece.
- The end cap. Open end, closed end, flush or recessed. It is visible from below on every single baffle, and it is two bought components per piece, fitted by hand, on a ceiling that may have hundreds of them.
- Perforation and backing. Whether the piece does acoustic work or just occupies the ceiling. A perforated face with acoustic backing and a solid one of the same profile are not the same product, even though the client is looking at the same render.
- The finish. The one detail that does get decided early, because it is the one with a sample attached.
Why this normally goes wrong
None of this is hard. It goes wrong because of when it happens and who is holding the figures.
The detail is usually settled after the price went out. The quote is built on area and a rate, the edge and the caps are agreed at sample stage weeks later, and nobody re-prices the job because by then the number has been accepted. Edge work and caps are not a line in the catalogue, they are an operation and a purchase, and they scale with the piece count rather than with the floor area.
The acoustic claim and the specified product drift apart in the same way. The figure quoted in the meeting generally belongs to the perforated version with backing. If what finally gets ordered is the solid piece in the same profile, the ceiling still looks right and the room still sounds like a room with a hard ceiling. That conversation happens after handover, and it is not a conversation anybody wins.
And the sample is one piece. The invoice is hundreds, each with the same edge pass and the same two caps.
What the module does with it
Profile, section, stock length, edge, caps, perforation, acoustic backing and finish are configuration, not notes. Picking a closed end instead of an open one moves the total while the client is looking at it, because caps are counted as the components they are. Changing the edge moves it too, because the work is attached to the pieces, not to the room. Switching the face to perforated with backing moves the acoustic result as well as the price, so the number on screen always belongs to the ceiling currently specified.
The preview carries the same change. The client picks the end detail looking at the end detail, not at a line in a specification, and the section through the ceiling redraws from the same source as the plan and the schedule.
What that buys, on the client's side of the table:
- A price attached to a detail at the moment it is chosen. "What do closed ends cost on this ceiling" is a number in the meeting rather than a variation later.
- A schedule that counts caps as pieces and edge work as work, so the person ordering material is not reconstructing the detail from a drawing note.
- An acoustic figure that belongs to the specified product rather than to the best case in the range.
- Two versions of the same room compared honestly in one sitting: the plain ceiling and the perforated one with backing, with both numbers visible.
- A cut list allocated to stock lengths with the waste showing, and the production documents generated from the same configuration.
Why it was hard: an option nobody can read is an option nobody picks
The detail choices live on a row of cards under the preview, and the first version of that row was built for a wide screen. On a laptop in a meeting, which is where this tool is actually used, the cards kept their layout and simply got narrower until the labels sat on top of each other. The Polish ones were worse, because longer words broke mid-word and turned into nonsense.
It would have been easy to file that under cosmetics. It is not. The whole argument for pricing the detail live is that the client goes through the detail, and nobody picks from a row of unreadable squares: they skip it, say "standard", and the decision goes back to being made after the quote. The fix was to make that row re-flow on its own width rather than on the size of the screen, so the cards stay legible on a small screen and the labels stay whole in both languages. Dull work, and it was the difference between a priced detail and an ignored one.
What this is worth on a fit-out job
The question is not whether a configurator can offer a perforated baffle. It is whether the choice between a solid piece and a perforated one with backing reaches the quote, the order and the acoustic promise as the same decision. If it reaches them as three separate decisions made by three people at three different times, one of them is wrong, and it is usually the one the client was told about first.
The baffle module can be clicked through on screen, detail options included: AxisMod. Putting your own profiles, your own detail catalogue and your own rates behind the same mechanism is what a module is for. The end of it that this grew out of, cut lists and CNC-ready files for the shop floor, is here: production support.
