Small parts are where material cost quietly eats your margin. Three habits:
- Shared cut lines. If two parts share a straight edge, put one line there, not two. Halves the cutting time on that edge and eliminates the thin fragile strip between them.
- Rotate to fit, then rotate to grain. For veneer, grain direction matters visually — for acrylic it doesn't, so rotate freely.
- Cut inner holes first, outer profile last. Otherwise the part shifts once it's free and your holes go crooked. Most software orders this correctly by default but check.
One more: keep a "offcut library" box sorted by size. Half my earring runs come out of scrap from signage jobs and the material cost is effectively zero.
