Work out how to cut a list of lengths from bar, tube, skirting, moulding or any other stock sold in fixed lengths, using as few sticks as possible. The saw kerf is taken off at every cut, you can have more than one stock length available at the same time, and you get a diagram and a cut list with measured positions. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded, no sign-up.
| Description | Length | Qty on hand |
|---|
Leave Qty on hand blank if you can buy as many as you need. Put a number in it to cap how many of that length get used — that is also how you feed in offcuts you already have on the rack (add a line for each, with a quantity).
In inches you can type fractions and feet: 96, 48 1/2, 8', 3' 6 1/4". Trim is material cut off each end of a stick before you start — factory damage, a bent end, a saw-cut square-up.
| Piece name | Length | Qty |
|---|
Yes. Each piece after the first on a stick needs one cut to separate it from the one before, and that cut turns a strip of material as wide as your blade into dust. Ten 300 mm pieces on a 3 m stick with a 3 mm kerf need 3000 mm of material plus 27 mm of kerf — so they do not fit, and this tool will tell you so instead of letting you find out on the ninth cut. The last cut, the one that frees the final piece from the drop, comes out of the drop and is shown in the offcut column. A chop saw is usually 2–3 mm, a mitre saw with a thin blade 1.6–2.4 mm, a bandsaw around 1 mm, a cold saw on steel 2–3 mm, an abrasive chop saw 3 mm or more. Measure yours once and keep the number.
Both, if that is what wastes least. Every stock line you leave open is a candidate; the optimiser tries filling each length with what is left and keeps the combination with the least material consumed overall. Switch Optimise for to “Fewest sticks” if handling and delivery matter more to you than the drop — you will normally get more long sticks and slightly more waste. If a length has a quantity, it is treated as a hard limit and anything that cannot be cut is listed separately rather than silently dropped.
Because the remaining pieces were too long to go anywhere else. Cutting stock is one of those problems with no fast exact answer, so this runs first-fit-decreasing, best-fit-decreasing, a stick-at-a-time fill, and dozens of shuffled restarts, then a clean-up pass that empties the least-loaded stick into the others and drops each stick to the shortest stock that still holds its contents. On lists of the size a joiner or a metalworker actually cuts, that lands on the true optimum most of the time and within one stick nearly always. If a result looks wrong, change the kerf by a tenth or reorder the list and re-run — a different starting order sometimes finds a better packing.
It does not know about mitres. A 45° mitre on both ends adds material at the long point, so enter the long-point length of each piece yourself; the same goes for coped ends and scribes. It does not sequence your cuts for grain, colour or profile matching, does not pair left- and right-hand parts, and assumes every stick is straight, square-ended and defect-free. It has no idea what your material costs, so “least material” means least length, not least money — if your 6 m bars cost less per metre, compare the totals by hand. And it will not stop you cutting a bent extrusion into six useless pieces: check the diagram against the actual stick before the blade goes down.