Wood · Cutting
Panel cutting optimizer
List the parts, set the sheet and the blade, and it lays them out on the fewest sheets — parts marked for grain keep their direction, every layout can be cut on a panel saw with straight, through cuts, and the offcuts worth keeping are marked. The example below, 34 parts for a run of kitchen cabinets on 2440 × 1220 sheets, takes 3: the area lower bound, with 90 % of the board used.
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How the layout is worked out
Parts are placed by guillotine bin packing: the board is kept as a set of free rectangles, and every part placed splits one of them with a single straight cut — so the whole layout can be cut on a panel saw, through cut by through cut. The packing is run with six orderings of the parts, three rules for choosing the free rectangle and six for the direction of the split: 108 layouts, and the one with the fewest sheets wins, then the one that leaves the most of the last sheet whole.
It is a heuristic, so the area lower bound is shown with the answer. Checked on 400 random jobs, every layout kept every part inside the trimmed sheet, never overlapped once the kerf was counted, never turned a grain-locked part, and was guillotine.
What this page does not do
- One board at a time. Different materials, thicknesses or colours are different jobs.
- No cut sequence for a machine. The layout is guillotine, but the order of cuts and the head cuts of a beam saw are not generated.
- No edge banding thickness. If the tape is thick, take it off the part sizes before you enter them.