How true-shape nesting saves a sheet

You buy the sheet either way. The only question is how many of them leave the rack for a job you have already priced.

Nesting is the part of the work that decides that. It is nothing more exotic than arranging the parts on the plywood before you cut — the same thing you do on the saw with a pencil, done by the app on every sheet at once.

## Rectangles are the easy way, and they cost you

Most sheet-layout software packs bounding boxes. Every part is treated as the smallest rectangle it fits inside, and the rectangles get tetris'd onto the sheet.

That is fast, and for a run of square case sides it is fine. Square parts are rectangles.

It stops being fine the moment a part is not square. A corner deck cut on a 45° gets a rectangle drawn around it, and the triangle of good plywood inside that rectangle is gone — spoken for, but never cut.

True-shape nesting packs the actual outline instead. Two of those corner decks can interlock across the diagonal, nested into each other, because the packer is looking at the shape rather than the box around it. Rectangles cannot make that placement at all.

## The one job we measured it on

The app ships with a sample kitchen: seven cabinets, four walls, already drawn. On 2026-09-04 we nested it twice.

Same kitchen. Same stock. Same tool, same rim, same gap. The only thing that changed was the nesting method.

- Rectangular nesting: 8 sheets - True-shape nesting: 7 sheets

One sheet, on one kitchen. Not a percentage, not a promise about your jobs — a number off a job you can open and re-run yourself, which is the only kind we will print.

That same nest is the screenshot on the nesting page: seven sheets of prefinished ¾ at 81% yield, every part labelled with its name and cut size. The 31 face-frame members are not on any of them — they are solid stock, so they go to the lumber list instead of onto ply.

## Grain lock is the setting that costs you the sheet back

Locking the grain tells the packer a part may not be rotated 90°. On a door, that is the whole job — a stile with the grain running the wrong way is a part you will throw out.

On a cabinet back nobody will ever see, it is a rule you are paying for in plywood. Locked grain on every part can eat a sheet or more on a big job.

That is why the grain lock is a per-run toggle rather than a permanent setting. Spend it where eyes land — doors, drawer fronts, exposed ends — and let the decks and the backs fall where they fit.

## The offcuts are stock you have already paid for

Every sheet reports its drops by size when the nest is done. Rack a drop and the app remembers it as stock for a later job, instead of writing it off as waste.

This is where the second sheet usually hides. A shop that racks drops is nesting the next kitchen onto plywood it bought three weeks ago.

## The numbers are yours, not ours

None of the above works on defaults you did not choose. The ones that move the sheet count:

- Sheet size, per material. The default is a 4×8 with the oversize your supplier actually ships — 48½ × 96½ — and door stock, prefinished and case ply can each carry their own. - Tool diameter. A ⅜ compression is the standard; the kerf comes off every part gap. - Sheet rim, the margin the packer keeps clear of the edge. - Small-part gap — a wider one for parts under 6″, because a 4″ part with a 3″ neighbour is a part that moves.

And when you know better than the packer, you overrule it: rotate a part, remake a single sheet, or drag a part onto a different one by hand.

## Getting the nest to the machine

Two roads out, and they are not the same road.

WoodWright writes G-code straight from the nest for eight controllers — Mach3/4, GRBL, LinuxCNC, Masso and more. Every one of those programs is simulated and read back before the app will offer it, and no WoodWright program has cut on a machine yet, so the app asks you to run your first one on scrap.

The other road is the layered DXF, which is the proven one. It is every cut part of a material, drawn in its own frame in tidy rows, for the CAM you already run to nest and toolpath.

Note the difference: the DXF is the parts, not the nest.

What each file contains, line by line is on the CNC page.

## Questions