Woodworking Calculators

Five calculators, and one design decision runs through all five: every input and every result lives in the page's URL, not in a session that disappears when the tab closes. Run a calculation, copy the address bar, and that exact result — inputs and answer both — is what opens for the next person, or for you, next week, on a different device. This page explains what's actually happening behind that link and how the five tools relate to each other; each tool's own page covers its specific inputs and method.

Why URL state, specifically

A calculator that only shows a result on screen is a dead end the moment the tab closes — the number existed for exactly as long as the page was open, and reproducing it means re-entering every input from memory or a scribbled note. Encoding state in the URL instead turns every result into something durable: a link in a shared cut list, a bookmark for a project you're still buying material for over several weekend trips, or a reference sent to someone else building the same piece. It also means a result on this site is inspectable — the inputs that produced a number are sitting in plain text in the address bar, not hidden inside a form that reset the moment you navigated away.

Zero-runtime-API, and what that actually buys you

None of the five tools makes a network request to compute a result. The species data, the joinery reference figures, and the calculation logic itself all ship with the site and run in the browser directly — which means a calculation returns instantly, works without a live connection once the page has loaded, and can't silently return a different answer on a bad day for some backend service. It also means the math is genuinely the same math the reference pages and the blog posts use, because every one of them draws from the identical calculation code these tools run — a board-foot figure quoted in a blog post and the same figure produced by the calculator for the same inputs will always agree, because there's only one implementation of the formula anywhere on the site.

The five tools, and what each one actually answers

Board foot and lumber cost answers "how much material, and how much will it cost" — the tool for pricing a project's material list before you buy, whether that's one board or a running list of every part a project needs.

Cut list optimiser answers "where does each piece actually land on a real board, and what's left over" — a materially different question from board feet alone, because the same total board-foot count can be bought and laid out a dozen different ways with very different amounts of offcut left behind, and the layout itself, not the total, is what a stock-buying decision actually needs.

Wood movement answers "how much will this board's width actually change" between two moisture conditions — the calculation most likely to prevent a genuinely ruined project, because a joint or a frame built without accounting for this number is a joint built to fail once the seasons turn.

Miter and bevel (angle) calculator answers the two-part question a compound-angle cut always asks: what rotation and what blade tilt produce a joint that closes cleanly, for both flat frames and sloped, flared, or leaning sides.

Wood weight answers "how much does this actually weigh" — a question that matters well beyond curiosity, covering shipping quotes, load ratings, and the practical question of whether a finished piece needs two people to move or one.

How the five chain together on a real project

These tools are rarely used in isolation on an actual build. A typical project touches several of them in sequence: board feet and cost to price the material and decide whether the project is affordable as designed, the cut list optimiser once the parts list is final to decide what stock to actually buy and how it lays out, wood movement for any wide panel or cross-grain joint before it gets built rather than after it cracks, the angle calculator for any joint that isn't a plain square cut, and wood weight once the design is settled to sanity-check that the finished piece can actually be moved, shipped, or supported by whatever it's going to sit on. None of the five requires the others to be useful on its own — a single board-foot check before an impulse lumber purchase is a complete, valid use of the site — but the chain above is the shape a full project's math usually takes from first cut list to finished piece.

What "computed, not guessed" actually means in practice

Every one of these five tools is built on formulas that are stated plainly rather than hidden — the board-foot formula is a single division, the movement calculation is one multiplication against a published shrinkage coefficient, the compound-miter math is trigonometry derived from the actual geometry of a sloped frame rather than read off a chart of uncertain provenance. Nothing about any of the five outputs is a black box returning a number you're asked to trust on faith; each tool's own page documents the method behind its result, and the reference and species pages linked from each tool show exactly where the underlying data — density, shrinkage, hardness — actually came from.

What a bare tool URL shows, and why it's never blank

Open any of the five tools with no query string at all — just the plain tool address, nothing appended — and it doesn't show an empty form waiting for input. Every parameter on every tool ships with a genuinely sensible default, so the bare URL renders a real, computed example result immediately: a real board-foot total, a real movement figure, a real angle. This matters for two different reasons that both point the same direction. First, it means the tool is actually demonstrating what it does the moment someone lands on it, rather than asking for five inputs before showing anything useful at all — you can see the shape of a real answer before deciding whether to change any of the defaults to match your own project. Second, it means there's no dead, contentless state for this site to accidentally ship: a calculator with a genuinely blank starting screen is a common failure on tool-focused sites generally, and it's avoided here by construction rather than by remembering to check for it.

The cut list optimiser's honesty about its own method

The cut list optimiser is worth calling out specifically, because it's the one tool making a real algorithmic tradeoff rather than evaluating a closed-form equation. It places pieces using a first-fit-decreasing heuristic — sort the required pieces longest to shortest, and place each one into the first stock board with enough remaining room, opening a fresh board only when nothing already open has space. This is not a claim of mathematically perfect, minimum-possible waste; true optimal bin-packing is a genuinely hard computational problem at any real project size, and a heuristic that is fast, deterministic, and explainable is the more honest tool to actually hand someone than a slower method chasing a fraction of a percent of additional savings. What the heuristic does reliably get right is the bigger lever on almost every real cut list: which stock lengths you tell it it's allowed to buy matters far more than the ordering trick itself, and the tool's own result changes accordingly the moment you widen or narrow the stock list it's allowed to draw from.

Reading a surprising result before assuming the tool is wrong

Occasionally a number out of one of these five tools looks wrong at first glance — a movement figure that seems too large for a "small" board, a weight that seems too high for a piece that "doesn't look that heavy." Before assuming an error, it's worth checking the actual inputs the result is based on: width and species drive movement far more than intuition expects, because the calculation is genuinely linear in width and a wide board multiplies a small-looking coefficient into a large-looking number; density differences between species are large enough that "wood" is a poor mental category for predicting weight, and two visually similar boards in two different species can differ by 50% or more. A result worth double-checking is worth checking against the actual formula stated on that tool's page, not against a gut sense of what "should" be true — the gut sense is usually the thing that's miscalibrated, not the arithmetic.

Sharing and reproducing a result

Because every input and result is encoded in the URL, sending someone else the exact number you got is as simple as sending the link — no separate export, no screenshot with a cropped-off input field, no "here's roughly what I got" secondhand description. This matters most on a shared project: two people building the same piece from the same cut list can each independently confirm the board-foot total or the movement allowance from a link rather than one person's word for it, and a result that gets revisited months later, when a project resumes after a pause, opens exactly as it was left rather than needing every input typed back in from memory.

Start with the board foot calculator if you're pricing a project for the first time, or browse the full set below.