Originally Posted by
Jim Becker
Chris, I use Cutlist Plus, but purely for sheet goods and it does allow you to compensate for grain direction, etc. For solid stock, I agree that hand-choosing is best. I use a piece of chalk to mark things out, usually after face jointing and skim planing the other side so that color and grain can be matched. Further, for solid stock, a cutlist program cannot accomodate "tilting" a component in a board to best utilize the grain that is present and that's something I find myself doing more and more to not only get better yield between any undesirable sap or "features" in a board as well as to keep the grain direction consistant with other components.