This woodoworking calculator tallys the board footage of the individual pieces in your project. All you need to do is enter each piece in the form below, along with the number of times it is required. To clear your selections, hit reset. To add additional areas to your project, hit "add piece".
| Portion | Hgt | Len | Width | # Pieces | Board Feet |
|---|
This lumber calculator is designed to help you plan out woodworking projects. Lumber is usually sold in board footage - this wood calculator takes each of the pieces in your project and figures out how much wood you need to buy to make them. It also includes a scrap factor (default 10%) in the event of mistakes, wood that doesn't meet the spec, and other variances. Click reset to clear the list of pieces (for a new shape); click add piece to construct a new piece of your total area.
What is a board foot: This is a standard unit of measure for lumber used by wood merchants. It is equivalent to a single square foot of board which is exactly one inch thick. This is equivalent to 144 cubic inches of material.
How do you calculate board feet: We calculate the square footage of the board and adjust it up or down based on the thickness of the wood. This last part is important - in the example above, the main piece of the table we are building is 9 square feet. However, it is actually 18 board feet since the part is two inches thick.
In the example above, we assume you are making a simple table. This project will require a main piece (lets assume this is a 3x3 board), 4 legs, and some support braces where the legs meet the main piece and the floor. We modeled these as six per leg (three on top, three on the bottom), which gives you a fair amount of space for decorative features. To use the board foot calculator, enter the basic dimensions each of the pieces into the lumber calculator. Also note how many of each you want. The board foot calculator will tally up the total board footage for the project. We then apply a scrap rate to bump our purchase quantity up slightly (for mistakes and perfectionism). And then - calculate the total price.