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TIL the average custom cabinet shop throws away about 20% of its sheet goods, and I believe it after cleaning my own dumpster
I was reading a Woodworking Network piece last month and it said the typical shop wastes somewhere near a fifth of every sheet of plywood or melamine. I went through my own scrap pile in the bay behind the shop and measured it out, and I was at 18% over three jobs. That is real money walking out the door every month, especially with birch plywood at $85 a sheet around here in Columbus. What are you all doing to cut down on offcuts, nesting software or just better cut lists?
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drew_jenkins543d ago
Numbers like that always sound worse than they are. A fifth of a sheet sounds terrible until you figure most of those offcuts are strips too small to do anything with anyway. Nobody is building a drawer box out of a 3 inch rip. And some waste is just part of doing custom work, weird angles and grain match eat up material no software can save. Cut lists and nesting help but they don't stop the trash can from filling up. Question is whether chasing that last few percent costs more in time than the wood is worth.
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