Cutting order on a panel saw

Cut Solver gives you a picture of where the parts sit on the sheet. It does not tell you what order to cut them in, and that order is most of the difference between a comfortable morning and a sheet on the floor.

Rips before cross cuts

A rip is a cut along the length of the sheet. A cross cut is a cut across a piece you have already ripped.

Take the sheet down into strips first, running the full length, then cut parts out of each strip. The reason is handling: a full sheet is 2440 by 1220 and heavy, and every rip you make turns it into something one person can hold against a fence.

Why the layout is always guillotine cuttable

Every layout Cut Solver produces can be cut with straight cuts that go all the way across whatever piece you are holding. That is called a guillotine layout, and it is the only kind that can be cut on a panel saw, a table saw or a track saw.

It is also why the layouts sometimes look slightly less tight than you think they could be. A layout that tucks a small part into a corner might use one per cent less board and be completely uncuttable on your machine, because getting to that part would need a cut that stops halfway. We do not produce those, on purpose.

If you have a CNC router, this constraint does not apply to you and the layouts are simply more conservative than they need to be. That is a trade we have made deliberately, because far more people own a saw than a router.

Keep one factory edge as your reference

Pick the straightest edge on the sheet, mark it, and use it against the fence for every rip. Do not use one edge for the first rip and the freshly cut edge for the second unless you have checked the first cut was true.

If you have applied a trim allowance, your first two cuts are trim cuts that create the reference edges, and everything after that works from them.

Cut the biggest parts first

Two reasons, and both of them are about what happens when something goes wrong.

If a large part is cut wrong, you can often still get smaller parts out of it. If a small part is cut wrong first, you have already destroyed the arrangement that would have let you recover.

The other reason is simply that a full sheet is the hardest thing to handle and you should do the hard handling while you are fresh, not at four in the afternoon.

Support matters more than the saw

A 2400 mm rip in 9 mm ply, working alone, is a two trestle job before it is a saw job. On the marine ply build every long hull panel had to be the first cut on its sheet for exactly this reason, because a half cut sheet with a 2400 mm panel hanging off it will fold under its own weight.

The rule of thumb: if the offcut side of the cut is longer than a metre and unsupported, stop and support it. Tearout at the end of a cut is nearly always a support problem rather than a blade problem.

Label as you go

The moment a part comes off the saw, write its label on the face in pencil. Not later, not at the end of the sheet.

On the school workshop job, 216 parts came off four sheets, and the difference between a labelled stack and an unlabelled one is an afternoon of measuring plywood rectangles to work out which project they belong to.

One sheet at a time

Finish a sheet, stack its parts, tick it off the printed diagram, then start the next. Running two sheets in parallel because two parts are the same width is how parts from sheet three end up in the pile for sheet one.

The diagram is printed one sheet per page precisely so that this is the natural way to work.