The sheet
Kerf is the wood the blade turns to dust. 3.2 mm is a normal table saw blade, 2.4 mm a thin kerf blade, and about 1.5 mm a track saw or a good blade on a small saw.
The parts
| Part | Length | Width | Qty | Grain |
|---|
Tick grain when the part may not be turned sideways, for instance a cabinet side where the veneer has to run down the length. Leave it clear and the tool may turn the part to pack it better.
- Sheets
- 0
- Yield
- 0%
- Offcut
- 0
- Cost
- 0
This draws the layout, not the order to cut in. Check your own sheet size and set your real blade kerf before you start.
Local onlyThe layout is worked out and checked by JavaScript in this tab. Your cut list is remembered in this browser's local storage, and nothing is uploaded.
Watch the Short
Four 2-foot shelves won't fit on one 8-foot sheet
Plays right here. Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play.
What this works out for you
A cut list is the list of pieces you need for a build. Say you're making kitchen cabinets: 8 sides, 6 shelves, 4 backs, 4 tops, each a specific size.
Plywood doesn't come in those sizes. It comes in big sheets, 8 foot by 4 foot. So you have to work out two things before you go to the store. How many sheets do I buy, and where on each sheet do I cut each piece.
People do this on graph paper, and most people guess. Guess low and you drive back to the store. Guess high and you've got a spare sheet in the garage at sixty to a hundred dollars for decent birch ply.
Two things make it harder than it looks.
The blade destroys wood. Every cut turns about 3 mm of plywood into sawdust. So four 610 mm pieces do not fit across a 2440 mm sheet, because the three cuts between them eat 9.6 mm and the last piece comes up short. That's the classic way somebody ruins a piece at the saw.
And plywood has a grain direction. On anything that shows, the grain has to run the right way or it looks wrong once there's finish on it. So some pieces can be turned sideways to pack better and some absolutely cannot.
This tool takes the parts list, handles both of those, tells you how many sheets, and draws every sheet so you can see exactly where each piece goes. It only draws layouts you can actually cut on a table saw.
Who needs it: anybody building cabinets, built-ins, bookshelves, workbenches, speaker boxes, van conversions.
Every cut goes all the way across
A table saw, a panel saw and a track saw all do the same thing. They cut straight across whatever is in front of the blade. So the layout here is built from nothing but full width cuts. Place a part, and the space left over is split into two rectangles by a single straight line, and those are the only places later parts may go. That is called a guillotine layout.
Which parts to tick for grain
Cabinet sides, door panels, drawer fronts and anything that gets stained. Leave it clear on shelves, bottoms, backs and anything nobody sees, and the layout gets noticeably tighter.
Why it sometimes asks for another sheet
Every part keeps the size you entered. The kerf comes out of what is left over instead, because the finished part has to be the size you asked for. That is why the tool sometimes wants another sheet when the arithmetic on paper says it should just fit.
Trim
Factory sheet edges are rarely straight and rarely square, and rough sawn boards have a waney edge. Set a trim and the whole layout moves in by that much on every side, so the first cut you make is a straight edge to work from.
What the check does before you see a layout
A layout that is wrong costs a sheet of plywood, so the plan is read back before it is drawn. Every part has to sit inside its sheet. No two parts may share any area. Every pair of parts that sit alongside each other has to be at least one kerf apart, because the blade has to pass between them. The number of parts drawn has to match the number you asked for. If any of that fails you get a message instead of a layout.
About the sheet count
The number of sheets is what this layout needs, not a proof that no better layout exists. The tool tries a few hundred arrangements and keeps the best one it finds, which is usually at or very near the best possible, but packing rectangles perfectly is a hard problem. If the last sheet comes out nearly empty, buy one spare anyway.
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