Arrrgggh Cutting diagrams!

[poolhound]

As many of you know I am in the process of building a base and extension cabinet for my BT. After trimming out the ply and putting on a seal coat this morning I set to getting everything together for the drawers.

I went to my stash of 1/2" ply and found to my dismay that I didnt seem to have half as much as I thought I did. I found various other pieces hiden around my shop and also decided to build some of the large ones from 5/8 as I had some of that as well and didnt want to have to go buy another sheet of 1/2"

I then spent most of this afternoon trying to figure out a cut list so I could get everything I needed from the various pieces of ply. It was very frsutrating and I did finally figure it out but it may have been more productive to just go out and buy another sheet.

Does anybody know if there is any magic software that you can input the sizes of pieces you need and the size of the sheets you have and it will just figure everything out for you?

[Alex Franke]

Have you looked at http://cutlistplus.com/?

[LCHIEN]

Have you looked at http://cutlistplus.com/?

that's the one.

[Uncle Cracker]

Ditto what others have said. CutList Plus will give you what you are looking for.

[poolhound]

Hmm interesting but not cheap.

Have you guys actually used this sw, what do you think?

[cwithboat]

Try this. It's free.
http://delphiforfun.org/Programs/CutList.htm

[LCHIEN]

Hmm interesting but not cheap.

Have you guys actually used this sw, what do you think?

they have a free trial.
Think of what it will save you if it saves one sheet of good plywood.

[Black wallnut]

Hmm interesting but not cheap.

Have you guys actually used this sw, what do you think?

Yes I've used it for years! Best software I've ever paid to license. Lifetime free upgrades. I'm on my second PC with it installed. It has been huge time saver.

[poolhound]

Well having discovered this morning that I made a mistake in my own layouts I downloaded both programs.

Cwithboat - Cool program and the price is right Problem is it could not come up with a solution even when I altered the dimensions of my parts to something I knew would work. I tried an example where there was lots of obvious options and it did work well.

CutlistPro - OMG what an awesome program. Just like with the free prog above I dialed in my cuts and materials and it couldnt find a solution. I had orginally left the parts a little oversize so I changed the dimensions for final sizes and bing bang boom there is my cutting diagram - AWESOME

[Alex Franke]

Here's another one I jsut ran across: http://www.cutmaster2d.com/ -- I don't know anything about it, though.

[BerniePA]

+1 on the Cutlist pro - I also have used it for years, I have the silver edition.

What I like is that you can also change how you want it to make your cutlist for you and end up for example with either maybe a 4 ft wide by 2 ft long end out of your sheet or a 1 1/5 wide by 8ft long peice out of your sheet just with a couple of key strokes.

Great peice of software. I don't do ANYTHING without putting it through the program, if nothing else, for future use if I ever decide to make another one, I have all the info I need.

[jabe]

Can this SW make your cutlist & cutting diagram so all the doors & drawer faces as well as all exposed surface of the project wood grain pattern aligns/match?

[gerti]

Have you looked at http://cutlistplus.com/?

Doesn't seem to run on any decent OS...

[LCHIEN]

Can this SW make your cutlist & cutting diagram so all the doors & drawer faces as well as all exposed surface of the project wood grain pattern aligns/match?

if i recall the good ones allow you to specify an orientation if needed, or ignore orientation if using, say, a grainles material like MDF.

[BerniePA]

Can this SW make your cutlist & cutting diagram so all the doors & drawer faces as well as all exposed surface of the project wood grain pattern aligns/match?

With Cutlist Plus you can designate grain orientation and if worse case scenario, you could "force" it to choose a certain board for particular parts, by manipulating the program somewhat -- not always the easiest thing to do to get the results you want, but perserverence usually is rewarded with the desired result.

I'm not saying the program is hard to use, but if you try to get really fancy and make it sort of do things it wasn't meant to do, you need to do things to fool the system and sometimes it takes some trial and error to get it right!!