Kerf Waste
Calculator

Kerf is the width of material removed by the saw blade or cutting tool as it passes through the workpiece. It's not scrap you can reuse; it becomes sawdust, so every cut permanently shrinks your total usable material by the kerf width.

Multiply the kerf width by the number of cuts to get total material lost. Ripping a board into 10 equal strips with a 1/8 inch kerf blade means 9 cuts removing over an inch of material overall, which is why the strips end up narrower than a simple division suggests.

Yes. A standard table saw blade typically cuts a 1/8 inch (3.2 mm) kerf, a thin-kerf blade around 3/32 inch (2.4 mm), and a bandsaw blade can be under 1/16 inch (1.5 mm), so switching tools can meaningfully change your yield on tight cut lists.

Subtract one kerf width for every cut you'll make, not just once for the whole board, then divide the remaining length by the number of pieces. Forgetting to subtract per cut is the most common reason a cut list comes up short on material.

Yes, though the amount differs: a laser's kerf can be a fraction of a millimetre while a router bit is closer to a saw blade's width. Any tool that removes material to separate pieces has a kerf, even if it's too small to see easily.