8x4 calculator

[LBCarpentry]

Can someone recommend me a decent app that will show the best ways to cut 8x4 sheets of whatever if I punch in all of my required sizes. I used to have a good one for my windows laptop but now I’m on a Mac it doesn’t work. If it’s an app that I can get on my iPad the that’s even better as I can have it open at the workshop.

Many thanks!

 

[will1983]

Don't know about an app but there's a programme called Max Cut available, do a search for it. I think it's free to..

 

[Jacob]

no doubt there's an app but there is also a highly effective rule of thumb (I must have posted this hundreds of times by now :lol: )
What you do is arrange your cutting list in descending order of size and cut out in that order, biggest piece first, each time from the smallest piece available.
You might have to apply a bit of attention to orientation (it works better for long timbers) but you could follow the rule on a drawing board to make sure.

 

[Droogs]

you could use this: http://workshop-buddy.com/
it's an online based thing and has proved useful to me in the past

 

[MusicMan]

no doubt there's an app but there is also a highly effective rule of thumb (I must have posted this hundreds of times by now :lol: )
What you do is arrange your cutting list in descending order of size and cut out in that order, biggest piece first, each time from the smallest piece available.
You might have to apply a bit of attention to orientation (it works better for long timbers) but you could follow the rule on a drawing board to make sure.

Jacob, just in case you think everybody ignores you, I have just used your rule to set out a cutting list for a pair of bookcases! It is indeed useful. Of course I checked the final result with a sketch and numbers (calculate twice, cut once), but it is probably more useful than an app.

Keith

 

[Jacob]

no doubt there's an app but there is also a highly effective rule of thumb (I must have posted this hundreds of times by now :lol: )
What you do is arrange your cutting list in descending order of size and cut out in that order, biggest piece first, each time from the smallest piece available.
You might have to apply a bit of attention to orientation (it works better for long timbers) but you could follow the rule on a drawing board to make sure.

Jacob, just in case you think everybody ignores you, I have just used your rule to set out a cutting list for a pair of bookcases! It is indeed useful. Of course I checked the final result with a sketch and numbers (calculate twice, cut once), but it is probably more useful than an app.

Keith

Pleased to hear it! :lol:
There are at least two aspects of the rule of thumb which would be difficult to impossible with an app.
First is it encompasses all your stock including misshapen offcuts without having to measure any of them before you start, still less to key them in.
Second - if you make a mistake and cut the wrong piece you just carry on following the rule without having to correct anything on the keyboard.
PS if you have a lot of bits n bobs of different sizes of stock, offcuts etc, it's a good idea to stack them in descending order of size so you can see what you've got.

 

[John Brown]

32.
And I did it without a calculator.

 

[peter-harrison]

Maxcut is fine- very easy to learn and quite versatile. You can use up offcuts by entering them in the materials list, named "offcut 1" etc, then optimising for that size, choosing the best diagram, deleting the items that appear on that diagram, then optimising with offcut 2, and so on.
There is a paid for one called Cutlist Plus, in which you can just enter all your offcuts and it will lay out your job in one hit. It is much harder to learn than Maxcut and I have given up on it.
Jacob's way certainly works well, but if you are starting with all 8x4s, it doesn't really help, as your choice of first cut (with or across the grain) may mess things up for smaller pieces.

 

[tomatwark]

I use Maxcut for my business, to give the lads print outs for cutting and also for me to order material in.

When we have a load of off cuts the lads go through them mark the print outs, I then edit the saved file and reprint.

This can save a few sheets of material now and then.

 

[Jacob]

.....
Jacob's way certainly works well, but if you are starting with all 8x4s, it doesn't really help, as your choice of first cut (with or across the grain) may mess things up for smaller pieces.

It still helps but you might have to think about orientation especially with the bigger pieces.
The main thing is that it's fast and easy and you use up your offcuts as you go.

 

[Myfordman]

I'm also a fan of Maxcut but I don't think they support any apple platforms.
If I was the OP I'd pick up a dirt cheap windows machine on ebay to run it on.
I run it on a 15 year old XP machine with no problems.

 

[Argus]

Sorry to suggest a reversion to paper, ink and pencils....... I live in a part of the world where mobile phones are completely useless - no usable signal for miles.

Many years ago, long before fancy apps, when mobile phones filled an average pocket, I had a job to do that used a large amount of Birch Ply sheets cut into many repetitive component shapes.

My solution then, which I still use when I (very rarely, these days) use sheet material, was to use that new-fangled Microsoft Excel to make a template on paper; in A4, though if you can copy on A3, it's better.

The template consists of a rectangular grid grid of squares, 96 squares by 48 and numbered in the margin, where I laid out the component shapes that I needed - at any angle if the surface grain direction was not important.

Apart from the initial effort laying it out in Excel, it was cheap - just the cost of paper and ink.
Effective when used with a numbered cutting list...... and for the times when I no longer have Excel, it works in PDF.

I still use this grid occasionally for working out cutting lists to get the most effective cuts out of straight planks. It really does minimize waste in the form of unusable off-cuts.