Guillotine vs Free Nesting: How Sheet Cutting Really Works
Why every cut should cross the whole sheet — and when free nesting actually wins.
What guillotine cutting means
A guillotine cut travels across the entire sheet or strip, edge to edge. Panel saws, table saws, glass score lines and most shears all cut this way. You cannot stop a circular saw halfway and resume elsewhere — so the cutting plan must respect it.
Rows (shelves) are the practical pattern
Professional sheet layouts pack parts into horizontal rows: one row holds parts of the same height, the saw slices the row free with one crosscut, then rips the parts apart. This is exactly what the sheet cutting calculator produces — every diagram is directly executable on a panel saw.
Free nesting looks better on paper
Free (true-shape) nesting rotates parts at any angle and interlocks them like a puzzle, often gaining a few percent of utilization. But the layout needs a CNC router or laser to execute — a saw cannot reproduce arbitrary angles, and handling small interlocked parts wastes operator time.
Kerf changes the geometry
Every guillotine cut consumes the blade width along its full length. A 4 mm kerf across a 2440 mm sheet removes nearly 10 cm² of material per cut — across 30 cuts per sheet that is a visible loss. The calculator reserves kerf along every row and every part boundary.
Which should you use?
Cutting by saw or shear? Use guillotine layouts — they are executable as drawn. Running a CNC router with full-sheet vacuum bedding? Free nesting can pay off on expensive material. Most workshops get 85–92% utilization from good row-based plans, which is within reach of what free nesting achieves in practice.
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