About SawPlot

SawPlot is a small, independent site with free tools for planning cuts in plywood, sheet goods and lumber.

Who runs this site

SawPlot is built and run by a woodworker who makes furniture and cabinets in a garage shop and mills lumber for the larger pieces: felling the tree, sawing it into slabs, drying and flattening them, and building large tables from the result.

Why it exists

SawPlot grew out of the planning side of that work. Cabinet jobs run on sheet goods, and working out how many sheets a run of boxes needs, and which sheet each part comes from, is a job for a tool rather than graph paper: the arithmetic is tedious, kerf and grain direction are easy to forget, and a mistake means another trip to the lumber yard or a part that comes out short.

The goals for the tools are simple. They should be free and work without an account. They should be fast on a phone in the shop as well as on a desktop. Every layout should be cuttable with ordinary tools, which is why the sheet optimizer only uses straight, edge-to-edge cuts. Your cut lists should stay on your device: the calculations run in your browser. And the tools should be honest about their limits, including the fact that a packing heuristic can't promise the best possible layout.

What you'll find here

• The cut list optimizer for plywood, MDF and melamine, with kerf, edge trim and grain.
• The board cut calculator for lumber and anything else cut to length.
• A sheet count calculator with a worked example of why area math falls short.
• Guides to sheet sizes, actual thickness and saw blade kerf.

Editorial standards

• Facts and figures in the guides link to their primary source: standards such as PS 1 and PS 20 published by NIST, APA – The Engineered Wood Association, and manufacturers' own spec pages. Where only a dealer listing is available, the guide says so. Where sources disagree, the guide gives the range and says so.
• How the calculators work, including what they don't do, is described on the methodology page.
• Mistakes get fixed. If you find a wrong number or a layout that can't be right, please get in touch. Real changes are recorded in the changelog.

Contact

Questions, bug reports and suggestions are welcome by email at hello@sawplot.com. The contact page lists what helps when you report a problem with a layout.