Plywood Sheet Calculator

In short This works out how many sheets of plywood, MDF or any other sheet material a set of identical parts needs, by laying them out in rows and columns on a full sheet and counting. It tries the part both ways round and uses whichever fits more, and that is worth doing far more often than people expect: across the part sizes this tool can lay out, turning the part changes the count more than half the time. A 300 × 700 mm part gets eight per sheet as drawn and twelve turned ninety degrees — a whole extra row. It also counts the kerf between parts, which matters more on sheet goods than people expect: a sheet full of small parts has a lot of cuts, and each one takes three millimetres or so of material. The important caveat is grain. Veneered plywood, melamine with a directional print and anything with a visible face grain cannot be freely rotated, because the grain has to run the same way on every part or the finished piece looks wrong. If that applies to your material, use the "as drawn" figure rather than the rotated one — the tool reports both for exactly that reason. The other limitation is worth being plain about: this lays out one repeated part in a grid. A real nesting program mixes different part sizes and fits them around each other, and will usually beat a grid. For a single repeated part, a grid is what you would cut anyway.