Board foot calculator

Every dimension must be a finite strictly positive number: zero or negative thickness, width, length, or piece count is rejected as invalid_input instead of a hollow zero.

What a board foot is and what the response contains

A board foot is the North American lumber volume equal to one hundred forty-four cubic inches: a rectangular solid one inch thick, twelve inches wide, and twelve inches long, or any other stick whose product of dimensions matches that volume. Yards, mills, and framing take-offs still price many species and grades by the board foot rather than by the cubic metre, so a reliable conversion from stick size to board-foot volume is the first number on a quote. Optional pieces, defaulting to one, scales a single stick into a line item without a second pass. There is no species table, no moisture factor, no nominal-to-actual shrink, and no dollars-per-thousand rate baked into the core number: you get volume so you can apply your own grade, waste, and mill rate after the pure geometry is known. This calculator accepts thickness in inches, width in inches, and length in feet — the three measures printed on a typical dimensional-lumber ticket — and returns board_feet as thickness times width times length times pieces, all divided by twelve. The response echoes the parsed thickness, width, length, and pieces, reports board_feet rounded to the requested precision, and also returns cubic_inches and cubic_feet so you can cross-check the same volume in other units. The unit tag is board_foot, cubic_inches_per_board_foot is the constant one hundred forty-four, and a short formula string restates the identity for audit. Rejected cases include missing fields, non-finite values, magnitudes above the supported ceiling, and any dimension or piece count that is not a strictly positive number.

How thickness, width, length, and precision stay reproducible

Prefer thickness for the inch measure of the face-to-face depth, with aliases thickness_in, t, and T so forms and query strings can reuse the same contract. Width accepts width plus aliases width_in, w, and W, always in inches, never in millimetres unless you have already converted. Length accepts length plus length_ft, length_feet, l, and L, always in feet; sending inches in that field would inflate the result by twelve and is a caller error, not a unit the engine guesses. Optional pieces, with aliases quantity, qty, count, and n, defaults to one and must be strictly positive when sent so a stack or a take-off line can be scaled without a spreadsheet. Optional precision, with aliases decimals and dp, chooses decimal places for every numeric field in the response, defaulting to four and capped at fifteen so JSON goldens stay stable across runtimes. Computation forms board_feet as the product of thickness, width, length, and pieces divided by twelve, cubic_inches as thickness times width times length-in-inches times pieces, and cubic_feet as cubic inches over one thousand seven hundred twenty-eight. Pair the free browser run on this page with the priced API when you need the identical mathematical result inside an automated pipeline. Failed validation is not billed, and nothing is stored after the response returns, which is the same split the rest of the tier-A catalog uses for interactive checks versus scripted take-offs.

Where board-foot take-offs fit in yards, shops, and software

On this page the work runs entirely in your browser; through the API each successful lookup costs $0.002, failed validation is not charged, and nothing is stored after the response returns. That split — free interactive exploration and a priced, identical API — matches the rest of the KIT tier-A catalog and lets you move from a phone check at the yard to an automated pipeline without changing the mathematical result.