I've seen sheet material calculators where you put in the size of your pieces and it lays them out in the most economical way to reduce waste on a 8 x 4 sheet. But is there any that you can put in an irregular shape and it does actually the same to reduce waste? The shape I want to use is curved sort of U shape. Not sure what software I'd use to come up with a usable file that could be used ? thanks
thanks but that would be just guess work I was looking for a piece of software that did it logically? It would be out of a 8 x 4 piece of birch ply so trying to save as much material as possible and get as many pieces as possible?
Trial and error maybe, but unless you're aiming to cut 100s of sheets I fail to see your problem. Software costs. I have done this sort of thing on AutoCAD to get fancy shaped stairs out of ply sheets and it worked fine (I actually went a step further and triangulated all the points on the stringers to allow me to plot them out full size onto my ply.)
you could try it on sketchup - its free. Once you've got the hang of it, it's pretty good. In your case you can draw out the shapes to scale, and then simply drag and drop them to see how they can best fit to minimize waste
Thanks with the pieces been a " n " shape I could lay them out next to each other and would get 4 pieces with lots of waste. But interweaving them I'm sure I could get 3 x as many or more