OptimalLayout — Free Cut Sheet Optimizer

Start with the real sheet, not the nominal size

Suppliers sell "2440 × 1220" or "8 × 4" boards, but the panel that arrives on the truck is rarely exactly that. Skin damage on the long edges, factory trim lines, and swelling from humidity all eat into usable area. Before entering the sheet dimensions, take a tape measure to a stack of boards from the same batch and record the smallest clean width and length you can guarantee across all of them. Typing that reduced figure into the base material card gives every subsequent calculation a realistic ceiling. It also protects you from the classic mistake of nesting a part flush to an edge that will later be trimmed off.

Kerf is not a rounding error

The kerf field looks small, but on a full sheet with dozens of cuts it becomes the single biggest lever on yield. A standard 3.2 mm carbide blade removes almost exactly one full 8 mm panel-thickness worth of material for every twenty cuts in a row. Skip it and the optimizer will happily place parts that physically cannot exist once the saw actually runs. As a rule of thumb: 1.2–1.5 mm for a fine trim blade on a table saw, 2.4–3.2 mm for a general-purpose ripping blade, 4–5 mm for a track saw with a coarse blade, and 4–6 mm for a panel saw at a lumberyard. When in doubt, measure the width of the sawdust groove on a scrap cut with callipers — that is your kerf.

Group by thickness and material, not by project

The optimizer treats every entry in the panel list as a piece to nest on the current sheet stock. That means it is almost always more efficient to plan one shopping list per material and thickness, even if the parts belong to three different projects. A shelf carcass in 18 mm birch ply and a drawer bottom in 6 mm hardboard should never share the same run: they come from different boards, they cost different money, and mixing them forces the algorithm into compromises that show up as waste. Keep separate saved projects per material, then combine the results at the till.

Label everything you cut

The label column is the difference between an elegant diagram and a stack of unmarked rectangles on the workshop floor. Use short, unambiguous names — "L-side", "R-side", "shelf-A", "back" — and reuse the same name across projects when the part is genuinely identical. Labelled parts get a colour in the printed diagram and appear in the cut list table, which becomes the reference sheet you take to the saw. Ten seconds of naming at the keyboard saves ten minutes of re-measuring in the workshop.

When to accept the extra sheet

Sometimes the optimizer will report that one panel — usually the last, largest one — pushes the job onto an extra board with 70% waste. Before hunting for a clever rearrangement, price the alternatives honestly: the cost of the extra sheet, minus the resale value of the offcut, versus the risk of splitting the part across a joint or ordering a slightly smaller version. In furniture work the offcut almost always finds a home in a later project; in shopfitting the joint rarely survives inspection. Trust the number the tool gives you, then make a business decision — not a puzzle-solving one.

Everything above is baked into the way OptimalLayout ranks placements, so following these habits will not make the algorithm work harder — it will let it work more honestly. Set the sheet size to what you can actually cut, dial in a realistic kerf, keep one project per material, name your parts, and treat the "sheets needed" figure as a business input rather than a score to beat.