Cut list terms.

Cut list

The list of pieces a job needs: a length, a quantity and a name for each one. It is the input, not the answer. What comes back once those pieces have been fitted onto real stock is the cutting plan.

Cutting plan Cutting layout, nesting plan

Which piece comes off which length of stock, in what order, and what is left at the end. This is what the calculator produces from a cut list.

Kerf Blade width, saw width

The width of material a blade destroys on every cut. A saw does not cut a line, it cuts a slot, and that slot is gone. Three millimetres across forty cuts is 120 mm of stock, which is usually exactly the piece you come up short by. A cutting plan that does not reserve one kerf between every pair of pieces will not fit on the bench.

Stock Bar, length, mill length

The material you cut from, before anything has been taken off it. Usually bought in standard lengths: 6 m bars, 8 ft timber, and so on.

Offcut Drop, cut-off

What is left of a length after the pieces have been taken from it. Every shop has a rack of them, and every one was already paid for. A cutting plan that ignores the rack will send you to buy stock you already own.

Remnant

An offcut long enough to be worth keeping. Where that line falls is a decision about your shop, not about arithmetic: below it a leftover is not an offcut, it is a bin. Setting the threshold changes which tails get reported as stock for next time. It does not change the plan.

Waste

Everything that does not become a piece. It splits into two very different things: sawdust, which is gone forever, and offcuts, which are only waste if you throw them away. A tool that reports one number for both is flattering itself.

Yield

The share of the stock you bought that ends up as pieces you wanted. Ninety per cent yield on a job means a tenth of what you paid for went in the bin or the rack.

Saw setup Stop setting

Moving the fence or the stop to a new length. Each one costs a minute and is a chance to make a mistake. A plan that groups equal cuts together buys no material at all, and can still be the fastest plan in the shop.

Mitre Angle cut, miter

A cut at anything other than square. A mitred piece is longer on one face than on the other, so a single length no longer describes it. Where two mitres meet at the same angle along a bar, one pass of the blade makes both faces, which is a real saving and one only an optimiser tends to spot.

Cutting stock problem 1D bin packing

The formal name for the question this tool answers: given stock of known lengths and a list of pieces, what is the fewest lengths you can do it in? It is NP-hard, which is the technical way of saying that guessing gets expensive fast and that people are bad at it past about a dozen pieces.

Optimal plan

A plan that no other arrangement can beat. Not "the best we found", but proven: the solver works out the theoretical minimum stock any plan could possibly use, and shows that this plan hits it. That proof is done by LinearCutting, the engine behind this calculator. When it cannot be proven inside the time budget, the plan says so rather than claiming otherwise.

The optimisation itself, and the optimality proof, are LinearCutting's. How that works → Or just make a cut list →