Sheet stock and kerf

These boxes on the Setup tab describe the sheet you are cutting from. They start from the first active Sheet Stock row in your Materials Library, and anything you change here only affects this job.

Sheet width and length

The size of your stock sheet, in your job's units (inches or millimeters). DoorCut fits the parts inside whatever is left after the edge trim is taken off.

Quantity

How many of these same sheets the job is allowed to use. Bump it up if the parts need more than one sheet.

Edge trim

The strip you clean off each edge of a fresh sheet before you start cutting parts (for factory snipe or banged-up edges). Nothing gets placed in the trim — it is waste around the outside. A normal value is about 0.25".

Heads up: the trim comes off every side, so you lose twice what you type across the sheet. If the trim would eat up more than about 10% of the sheet — say you typed 5 when you meant .5 — DoorCut stops and asks you to confirm before it throws that much away.

Kerf (saw blade width)

How wide a path your blade cuts. DoorCut leaves that much room between parts so the cuts do not eat into the next piece. It is not taken off the outer edge unless you also set edge trim there.

Carbide reminder for MDF and melamine: these abrasive sheets dull a steel blade fast — use a carbide-tipped blade and match the kerf here to what's actually on the saw. Typical values: thin-kerf carbide 0.09–0.11 in, full-kerf carbide ~0.125 in.

How you want to cut

Strict guillotine

The default. Every cut runs straight across the whole piece of stock — a full rip or a full crosscut — the way most shops break down a sheet. This keeps the layouts clean and easy to cut on the saw.

Rip-first (shop default)

Tries a few different ways to pack the sheet — a tight nest, a row-by-row rip layout, and a straight-cut nest — and keeps whichever uses the most of the sheet. The tighter ones get tried first so they are never skipped, and on this setting parts can use small offcuts down to about 1" so less of the sheet goes to waste. Use it when you want practical saw flow without the big empty patches a plain row layout can leave on mixed jobs. The bar on the Layout tab tells you which one won (for example Smart: MaxRects).

Grain direction

When Respect grain direction on grained materials is checked, veneered plywood and similar sheets keep their face grain running the same way (they will not get turned sideways). Plain MDF and melamine with no real face grain can still be turned to pack tighter.