Calculators
Fit your parts to stock lengths of timber, pipe, bar or extrusion, with kerf accounted for on every cut. Free, in the browser.
Linear stock is anything you buy by the length and cut to length. Timber and skirting, steel bar and box section, copper pipe, aluminium extrusion, decking boards, conduit. Width and thickness are fixed when you buy it, so the only question is how to group your part lengths onto stock lengths with as little left over as possible.
That makes it a different problem from sheet cutting, not a simpler version of the same one. There is no geometry to worry about, no grain and no rotation, but the number of ways to group parts onto sticks still grows explosively as the list gets longer. Finding a decent answer is easy. Finding the answer that saves you a length of stock on a tight job is the part that takes real search, and it is where a calculator earns its keep.
Free to use
The method most people use at the bench has a name in the literature: first fit decreasing. Sort the parts longest first, then place each one on the first stock length with room for it. It is quick, and on loose jobs it does fine. On tight jobs it strands length, because a greedy choice early on can leave three sticks each carrying an offcut slightly too short for the parts that remain. One combination swap would have freed a whole stock length, but by hand nobody goes looking for it.
An optimizer does go looking. It searches combinations of groupings that a person never would, which on a long parts list is regularly worth a stock length or more. The same family of mathematics sits under sheet layout too, and the article on the stock cutting problem explains why the search is genuinely hard rather than just tedious.
Each cut removes a blade width, about 3 mm for a chop saw, more for an abrasive wheel. Twenty cuts on one stick is 60 mm gone, and the plan that ignored it now has a final part 60 mm short. The calculator subtracts kerf on every cut, so a grouping only appears in the results if it genuinely fits. It also respects a trim cut at the ends when you want to clean up mill ends or out-of-square factory cuts before the first part comes off.
Suppliers rarely sell one length. Timber commonly comes in 2.4, 3.0, 3.6 and 4.8 m, steel in 6.0 and 7.5 m, and the price per metre is rarely the same across them. Enter every length you can buy, with prices, and the calculator works out which mix covers the job cheapest. Sometimes the answer is all long lengths, sometimes it is two long sticks and one short one, and the only way to know is to try the combinations.
Offcuts worth keeping can be entered as stock in the next job, so the remnant pile behind the saw gets shorter rather than taller. Parts and stock both accept metric, decimal inches or fractions.
The output is one diagram per stick, showing each part in order with its length, exported as a PDF for the bench. Group the sticks that carry identical sequences and a stop block does most of the work, one setup per length instead of a tape measure and a pencil line for every cut. Parts can be labelled as they come off the saw, and each printed label carries the part name and dimensions, which matters once three trades' worth of lengths are stacked in the same rack. The diagrams also mark which end holds the offcut, so the keepers get set aside instead of swept up.
Framing work in dimensional lumber is linear cutting with its own conventions, stud spacing and plate lengths among them, and it has a dedicated page at the 2x4 cut list calculator. If your job is sheet material rather than lengths, start with the cut sheet calculator for the workflow or the plywood cut calculator for material-specific detail.
Free to use