What a Cabinet Cut List Has to Carry Before Anything Gets Cut

Seven things on every line

Six of these are on most cut lists. The seventh decides whether you cut a whole kitchen in one run or a box at a time.

Be pedantic about that last one, because two cabinets on the same job are often both called Upper. A parts list that names them identically hands the bench two piles it cannot tell apart, and the mistake surfaces at the end of the day rather than the start.

That is the canonical shape of a part here, so it is what every view and every export carries. When two cabinets answer to the same name, the row carries that cabinet's size alongside it, so a program reading the file groups two boxes as two. The cut list reads grouped by cabinet or grouped by wall, which are the two ways a shop sorts a pile.

Kerf belongs to the tool in the machine

Kerf is the width the cutting tool turns into dust. On a sliding saw it is the plate plus the carbide, on a CNC it is the diameter of the bit in the spindle, and neither is whatever number the software shipped with. A default kerf is somebody else's tooling.

It matters more than it sounds because the error compounds along the sheet instead of staying where it started. Ten rip lines at a kerf half a millimetre off is five millimetres unaccounted for by the last strip, and the part that does not fit is the last one, which is the one you cut after you stopped paying attention.

So the test for software is narrow: can you type your own number, in your own unit, and does the layout reserve it between parts. Ours takes millimetres, inches or a fraction such as 1/8, offers the values shops usually land on as presets from 1.6 mm to 4.0 mm, and asks for the blade or the bit rather than pretending there is one kind of machine.

One thing here genuinely is about one machine. A panel saw can only make a guillotine cut, edge to edge across the piece in front of it, which forces the layout into clean strips. A router is under no such constraint. That is why turning a part ninety degrees to save material is a CNC option in our optimizer and not a saw one: at a saw every copy of a part type gets cut the same way round, because that is how a stop and a fence work. Grain is respected either way.

Grain lock and grain matching

These get treated as one feature and they are two jobs.

Grain lock is about one part. A finished end, a door, a drawer front: the figure has to run the right way, so the part may not be turned to make it fit. Most software has this. It costs yield, since locking a part cuts its placement options from four rotations to two, and the nesting guide works through that trade.

Grain matching is about a set of parts. A bank of four drawer fronts is cut in order out of one board so the figure runs across all four when the bank is assembled. Treat those four as four independent grain locked rectangles and the nester will scatter them across three sheets, every one correctly oriented and no two related. Nothing about the cut list was wrong. The kitchen still looks wrong.

Grain matching is the part of the job a customer sees from the doorway and cannot name. A shop that has it does not talk about it. A shop that loses it gets a phone call.

Finished size in, cut size out

Edgebanding sits on top of the panel, so a part that has to finish at 570 mm with 1 mm on both long edges gets cut at 568 mm. Everybody knows this. The place it goes wrong is that the allowance belongs to the edge, not to the part: a side is normally edgebanded on its front edge only, a shelf on its front edge, an exposed end on two, and a back on nothing at all. A cut list with one edgebanding checkbox per part has already lost the information.

So you type the finished size, pick the edgebanding per edge, and get the cut size back. The rolls come out of your Materials Library and are shared across projects, so the 1 mm PVC you actually stock is the 1 mm the arithmetic uses, and the sizes on the layout already have both the kerf and the edgebanding taken off. At 0.4 mm on interior parts plenty of shops ignore the fraction. At 2 or 3 mm on a shelf it decides whether the shelf goes into the opening, and the ranges are in the edgebanding guide.

The offcut rack is inventory

Every shop has a rack. Fewer have an offcut system, and the difference is whether the rack is a fact the software knows or a pile it has never heard of. Three things separate them. It carries between jobs, because an offcut saved inside one job's file is invisible to the next one, which is the same as not having saved it. It goes down when you cut, since a rack that only ever grows is a wish list. And it does not move while you are still thinking: if a preview eats inventory, nobody trusts the rack after the first week.

Ours holds the offcuts in your account rather than inside the job, so it is the same rack on every job and every computer you sign in from. You set the smallest piece worth keeping, and anything bigger than that on both sides is saved instead of counted as waste. A strategy switch decides whether a layout opens the rack before it opens a new sheet or ignores it to chase the best yield on full sheets, which are two legitimate answers depending on whether the job is one kitchen or forty boxes. And the rack only changes when you say the cuts were made: that one action decrements what the nest used and saves the new offcuts.

That last part is a design decision, not a detail. A shop tries five layouts before it cuts. If the rack moved on all five it would be wrong by four.

A part that cannot say what it is

At one cabinet, labels are optional. At forty, the parts pile is the bottleneck and every unlabelled rectangle is a decision somebody makes twice. The label has to survive the trip from the machine to the cart to the bench, which means printing at the size of the stock you actually buy rather than scaled to fit a letter page.

CabDesign prints stick-on labels for every cut part, drawn at the real size of your label stock. You design the template once on the Shop Details page, and every job prints against it from its outputs page, so the label is a shop standard nobody re-decides. If you scan parts it carries a barcode, a QR code or both, with a print-time override for the run where you want a plain sheet.

The handoff out

A cut list is finished when the next station has it. In practice that is three files.

What a shop that has been burned before cares about is not the format list, it is whether the format holds still. Each profile carries its version in its own name, and the rule written into the code is that a format change is a new version, never a quiet edit to the old one. The bytes are deterministic and a golden file in our build gate fails the build if they move, so the mapping you set up once at the cut station keeps working. All three also read the same data the screen reads, so a file cannot disagree with what you approved.

The same boundary runs the other way in, and it is narrower: parts paste in from a spreadsheet, tab or comma separated with the header row skipped for you, and materials arrive as a CSV.

Where we stop, said out loud

A checklist that only lists what we do is marketing. Here is the other half, which you would test inside ten minutes anyway.

We do not write g-code, toolpaths or a post for a named machine. That is a decision written into the export layer rather than a gap in it. A post maintained against the machine dialects in the field never finishes and never gets good, and one that is subtly wrong is worse than none. We hand a CNC shop a neutral DXF of the nested sheets and let the CAM software you already trust do the part it is good at.

We do not open another program's project file. No importer for one exists here. What comes across is parts and materials, as above. Your cabinet library and your construction standard get rebuilt once, which is a real cost worth pricing honestly: for a 32mm shop it is a day of decisions you already know by heart, not a quarter of reverse engineering.

It needs a connection. There is no offline mode, so a shop with no signal cannot design. What actually goes to the floor is not the browser: it is the printed cut diagrams, the printed labels and the files you exported, which are on paper and on disk once they exist.

Not writing g-code is a position, not a roadmap item, and this page is where we would say so if it ever changed.

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