Every other tool on this site tells you what a board measures. This one tells you how many to buy. Enter the pieces you need to cut, your stock board length, and this figures out the fewest boards and exactly what to cut from each one — accounting for saw kerf so the math actually holds up in the shop.
| Cut length (in) | Quantity |
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This uses a "first-fit decreasing" packing strategy — the same general approach professional cut-list and nesting software uses for one-dimensional stock. It sorts your cut list longest-to-shortest, then places each piece onto the first board that has enough room left, opening a new board only when nothing already in progress fits. It's not always the mathematically perfect answer (that's an NP-hard problem for large lists), but it's consistently close to optimal and matches how an experienced framer would lay it out by eye.
Kerf — the width of material the saw blade actually removes — is subtracted between every two pieces cut from the same board, since that material becomes sawdust, not usable offcut. A typical circular saw blade has a kerf around ⅛" (0.125"); thin-kerf blades run closer to 3/32" (≈0.094").