How to make a cut list.

What a cut list actually is

A cut list is the bridge between a drawing and a saw. The drawing says what the thing looks like; the cut list says what pieces it is made from, how many of each, and (if it has been optimised) which piece comes off which length of stock, in what order.

Two different documents get called a cut list, and it is worth being precise about which one you mean:

• The requirement. Every piece you need: length, quantity, and what it is. This is what you write.
• The plan. Which pieces come off which bar, with the offcut at the end. This is what you get back once the requirement has been nested against your stock.

Writing the first one is your job. Working out the second one, which combination of cuts wastes the least material, is arithmetic that gets genuinely hard past about a dozen pieces, and it is what the calculator is for.

What belongs on the requirement

1. A length, and be honest about the units

One column, one unit, no exceptions. Half a cut list in millimetres and half in centimetres is how a job gets scrapped. If you work in imperial, write it in imperial: fractions are fine, and 15 3/4 or 1' 3 3/4 are both readable.

2. A quantity

Not "a few". Not "same as before". A number. Every ambiguous quantity on a cut list becomes a phone call, and phone calls happen while the saw is stopped.

3. A label that means something at the saw

Upright beats Part 3. The label is not for you, it is for whoever picks the piece up off the floor two hours later and has to know where it goes. If two pieces are the same length but do different jobs, label them differently. The plan will still cut them together, but the person sorting them will thank you.

4. The material, if the job mixes them

The moment a job involves two sections, two species, or two finishes, the cut list needs a material column, because a plan that nests an oak rail onto a pine length is a plan that gets you a scrapped rail. Tag them and each material gets nested on its own.

5. Angles, if anything is mitred

A mitred piece is longer on one face than the other, so "1800" is not enough information to cut it. Record the angle at each end. Where two mitres line up along the bar, one pass of the blade makes both faces, which is a real saving, and only an optimiser will spot it.

What people forget

The blade

This is the big one. A saw does not cut a line, it cuts a slot, and that slot is gone. Three millimetres does not sound like much until you make forty cuts and find you are 120 mm short, which is exactly one piece you cannot make. Every cut list that gets nested needs a blade width against it, and every plan worth trusting reserves one between each pair of pieces.

The ends of the stock

Mill ends are dinged, painted, and rarely square. If you are going to face them off, say so, and let the plan take that material off the top rather than discovering it is missing at the last piece.

What is already on the rack

Most shops are sitting on a rack of offcuts they have already paid for. A cut list that only considers new stock will happily send you to buy a bar you already own twice over. List the offcuts. It is the cheapest saving available.

Then stop doing the hard part by hand

Once the requirement is written, the nesting is a solved problem, and it is not a problem humans are good at. Paste the list into the calculator, tell it your stock and your blade width, and it comes back with every bar drawn to scale, every cut dimensioned, and the offcut measured at the end.

The optimiser underneath is LinearCutting, and when it says a plan is optimal it means no other arrangement of your cuts uses less stock. Proven, not estimated. How that works →