Two units for one profile
A vinyl profile is stocked and consumed in feet — the bill of material adds up lengths, and the inventory ledger moves feet. But it is bought, racked and counted in sticks: a supplier ships full lengths, and the person at the rack counts what is there. A cut list that only says feet asks somebody to do division at the saw, and the division gives the wrong answer.
Why feet ÷ stick length undercounts
412 feet ÷ 16 feet a stick = 25.75, so "26 sticks". That is only true if every piece could be cut from anywhere along any stick, with no blade and no ends. In practice:
- A piece can't span two sticks. Eight 100-inch pieces are 66.7 feet — 4.2 sticks on paper. On 192-inch sticks they take eight sticks, one piece each, leaving eight offcuts of about 92 inches unless shorter pieces are cut from them.
- The blade takes its width. Each cut loses the kerf, typically an eighth of an inch. Over dozens of cuts a stick that "fits" on paper comes up short.
- Ends are trimmed. Mill ends and squaring cuts come off before the first good piece.
- Waste is real. A bill of material line usually carries a waste percentage; a recalculation from pieces × length that drops it orders short on every profile that wastes anything.
So the number of sticks comes from the cutting plan — pieces packed onto bars — not from total feet. The feet are still the right number for costing and the ledger; the sticks are the right number for the rack and the purchase order. A good cut list shows both, side by side.
The order the saw cuts
Once pieces are packed onto bars, the order they're cut in matters to the operator, not to the material:
- One profile at a time, so the operator isn't changing stock every few cuts.
- Longest first within the profile, so short pieces can come out of what's left.
- Identical lengths back to back, so a positioner barely moves between cuts.
- Every piece names its bar — "bar 3 of 12" — and the list says which offcuts to keep, so the material used is still the plan's.
Re-ordering the cuts this way must never change which bars the plan uses; it only changes the order they come off the saw.
How precise is a cut length?
Window cuts are usually floored to a sixteenth of an inch, and a sixteenth is exactly four decimal places: 0.0625. Print every length to four decimals, keeping trailing zeros (30.5000 above 30.5625), so a column of cuts lines up and two lengths can't be mistaken for one. A cut that lands on a thirty-second needs a fifth place — 12.59375 is a real length, and rounding it to 12.5938 prints a number nobody can set a stop to.
Offcuts worth keeping
The 92-inch pieces left by the example above are not scrap; they're the next cart's sills. Decide a minimum length worth keeping per profile, label and rack what's above it, and let the next plan draw from offcuts before full sticks.
How Extrusia handles it
Extrusia keeps vinyl in feet for the bill of material and the ledger, and reads each part's purchase unit from the item master — a 16-foot stick, say — to show sticks beside feet on every material read: a job's material, a cart's requisition, the reorder list and what's on hand. A part with no stick length is shown as feet only, never as a guessed stick count. The saw screen cuts each profile longest first with identical lengths together, prints every length to four decimals (five on a thirty-second), names each piece's bar, and can send each cut straight to a TigerStop positioner through Machine Connect.