The geometry of carpentry and joinery Original Research Article

In this paper, we propose to model a simplified wood shop. Following the work of Demaine et al. (Comput. Geom.: Theory Appl. 20 (1–2) (2002) 69) we limit the cutting tools of our carpenter to a circular saw. We extend that previous work to include a model of basic rules of carpentry and joinery. This model is then applied to the problem of building a polygon P by joining together strips of wood and cutting them with a circular saw. We describe a linear time algorithm to decide if a blueprint can be constructed in such a workshop.