Plan your sheet cuts before you pick up the saw.

Start with the sheets you can actually buy

Add plywood, MDF, melamine or metal sheet from the stock library, or enter a custom size. Give each material and thickness its own stock entry. A part needs matching stock; a 16 mm melamine panel cannot use an 18 mm plywood sheet just because it fits.

Set a quantity when your supply is limited. Leave it blank when the optimizer may use as many sheets of that type as needed. Add prices if you want to compare layouts by stock cost. The library contains metric starting sizes; imperial mode displays converted dimensions, and you can enter your supplier's actual inch sizes.

Enter your parts in metric or imperial units

Select millimetres or inches in your signed-in account's measurement control. Add individual parts, generate them from a cabinet, or paste a spreadsheet. Include width, height, thickness, quantity and material. Decimal and fractional inch input helps when working from imperial drawings.

Measure actual stock and hardware. Nominal lumber sizes and product names do not necessarily describe finished dimensions. Measurements are stored at 0.01 mm precision; changing the display unit does not resize existing parts.

Kerf, trimming and edging do different jobs

Kerf is the width of material removed by the blade. Two 300 mm parts need more than 600 mm of stock if a cut separates them. Enter the kerf for your blade and cutting process rather than relying on a generic value.

Edge trim removes unusable stock around a sheet. Edging belongs to the component: a finished panel 600 mm wide with 1 mm edging on both width edges needs a 598 mm cut blank. Select finished or raw sizing deliberately so you do not subtract edging twice.

Control grain and rotation

Set grain direction where the face pattern or wood grain must run a particular way. Rotation controls whether a part may turn to fit the layout. Check the preview against the visible face of your actual board, especially for cabinet doors or neighbouring panels that need a consistent appearance.

Review the cutting plan

Create the cutting plan, then inspect every sheet and any unplaced parts. Choose whether the search should prioritise stock usage, cost or cutting effort. More search time can explore more arrangements, but no setting guarantees the absolute minimum waste.

KerfGuide plans rectangular parts using straight guillotine cuts. It does not generate CNC toolpaths, curved nesting or sink cut-outs. Export the parts and cuts, or print layouts and labels, after checking the dimensions and cut sequence for your workshop.

Bring an existing spreadsheet

Use the component import preview to check column mappings, quantities and measurement units before adding rows. Keep project JSON as a portable backup; it uses canonical millimetres regardless of your display preference.