1
Quick start
- Enter your stock length — the full length of bar you buy from your supplier.
- Set the kerf — the width of material your saw blade removes with each cut.
- Add each required piece to the cut list with its length, quantity, and an optional label.
- Hit Calculate and Bar Nest will work out the most efficient cutting plan.
- Use Manual Adjust if you want to move cuts between stock lengths after the optimiser has finished.
2
What the fields mean
- Stock length
- The full length of each bar/tube/section you purchase, in millimetres.
- Kerf / cut loss
- How much material the saw blade removes per cut. Typically 2–4 mm for a bandsaw, 1–2 mm for a cold saw.
- Minimum useful offcut
- The shortest leftover piece you’d keep for future use. Anything shorter is treated as waste.
- Cost per stock length
- Optional. If entered, Bar Nest will calculate total material cost and cost per finished metre.
3
How the optimiser works
Bar Nest uses a First Fit Decreasing bin-packing algorithm. It sorts your cuts from longest to shortest, then places each cut onto the first stock length that has enough room. This is one of the most effective methods for minimising waste in 1D cutting problems.
Kerf is automatically accounted for between each cut on a stock length — you don’t need to add it to your cut lengths.
4
Manual adjustments
- Manual Adjust switches the results into an editable view where every stock bar is shown separately.
- Drag a cut onto another stock bar to try a different layout. Bar Nest updates the actual cut count, cut mix, used length, waste, reusable offcut, and cost after each valid move.
- Invalid moves are blocked if the cut would make the destination stock length too long once kerf is included.
- Show Optimised View returns to the original grouped optimiser output without losing your manual changes.
- Reset Manual Plan puts the manual layout back to the optimiser’s original arrangement.
- Copy Summary, Export CSV, and Print Plan use whichever view is currently active.
5
Tips & shortcuts
- Label your parts — labels appear on the cutting plan so your shop floor knows exactly which piece is which.
- Duplicate rows to quickly add similar cuts without retyping.
- Reorder rows with the Up/Down buttons to keep your cut list organised.
- Set a minimum offcut to flag leftover pieces that are long enough to reuse on future jobs.
- Export to CSV to save your results, or Print Plan for a shop-floor-ready cutting sheet.
- Copy Summary pastes a plain-text breakdown to your clipboard — handy for emails or quoting.