Cut List Calculator

In short A cut list calculator works out how many stock boards a set of finished pieces needs, and where each piece should come from. The part almost every hand-drawn plan gets wrong is the kerf: every cut turns a strip of board into sawdust, typically an eighth of an inch on a table saw and around three millimetres on a mitre saw, and if you plan three 32-inch pieces from a 96-inch board on paper they fit exactly — and in the workshop the third one comes up two kerfs short. This tool counts a kerf on every cut between pieces, which is one fewer than the number of pieces on each board, because you do not cut before the first one. It also reports a floor: the number of boards you would need with a perfect saw and no waste at all, which is simply the total length divided by the stock length rounded up. If the layout matches that floor, no arrangement can do better. If it does not, some of the gap is the saw and some is packing. The packing here is longest-piece-first into the first board it fits, which is fast and usually good but not provably optimal — for a large or awkward list, reordering can occasionally save a board, so check the offcuts before you buy.