Lay out melamine cabinet panels with the lowest waste possible. Made for closet, kitchen, and shop builds where chip-out is expensive.
Open the Optimizer →Melamine is particle board or MDF with a heat-fused decorative laminate on both faces. The face is hard, brittle, and chips easily — one bad cut and the whole panel is scrap, because chipped melamine can't be sanded out. That makes accurate cut planning more important than for raw plywood: you want every dimension right the first time, and you want to fit as many parts as possible per sheet to keep material costs down.
Use the calculator to map out your full project before touching the saw. Enter your panel size (most melamine ships in 4×8 ft or 49×97 in for North American kitchen modules; 2750×1830mm in European TFL stock), the kerf of your scoring blade, and the parts list. The tool returns a layout that minimizes both sheet count and the total number of cuts.
| Panel | mm | inches |
|---|---|---|
| Standard (US cabinet) | 2440 × 1220 | 96 × 48 |
| Cabinet shop oversize | 2440 × 1525 | 96 × 60 |
| European TFL | 2750 × 1830 | 108 × 72 |
| Long-grain panel | 3050 × 1220 | 120 × 48 |
Score before you cut. If your saw doesn't have a scoring blade, run a shallow scoring pass first — about 1.5mm deep — on the bottom face. Then make the through-cut. This stops chip-out on both sides.
Use a triple-chip blade. 80T TCG blades made specifically for melamine cost more but pay for themselves on the first chipped-panel rescue.
Keep the good face up on a table saw. Tear-out happens on the exit side of the blade. Track saws are the opposite — good face down.
Plan for edge banding. Cut parts slightly oversized if you'll be edge-banding both long edges — the iron-on tape adds about 0.5mm per edge.
Don't rotate freely if pattern matches. If your melamine has a directional wood-grain print, lock parts to one orientation in the optimizer (or it'll suggest rotations that look wrong on the finished cabinet).
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