Vivifex
estifex.com →Estifex works out what a part really costs a workshop in solid timber — the board the yard sells, not the finished size on the drawing. The same figures become a numbered quote for the customer and a cutting list for the bench.
Why it exists
The finished leg is smaller than the blank it is cut from, and the blank is smaller than the board on the rack. Price the finished size and the shavings have been given away. Price the blank at the thickness it holds after planing and a board has been sold that does not exist.
A blank of 630 × 100 × 23 does not come off a board of 630 × 100 × 23. It is bought as 700 × 110 × 32, and the last step is the one nobody does in their head: 23 mm reads like a 26 board, but with the 4 mm a planer takes it needs 27, and what is sold is 32. On a chair that is seventeen per cent of the oak — every time, in every chair.
The board rule is applied in one order and shown as two figures side by side: length +50 mm rounded up to a full 50, width +10 mm, thickness +4 mm for planing or +1 mm for turning, then up to a thickness the yard actually sells — 26, 32, 40 or 50 mm. In millimetres rather than a percentage, because a percentage grows with the part and invents waste: a 1415 mm stretcher became a 1600 blank nobody cuts, where the sensible answer is 1500, two out of a 3000 board with nothing left over.
Sheet goods are kept apart from timber. Plywood and MDF hold their own thickness and are figured by the square metre — nothing is planed off, nothing is rounded up to a timber thickness, and no waste allowance is added for knots that are not there.
Too thick for any board is a question, not a guess. May the part be glued — in thickness or in width? Until somebody answers, that part is not priced at all, and the price says so rather than quietly inventing a board.
A quote takes its number when it goes out, not when it is worked out — a workshop tries five prices before sending one, and five numbers would leave gaps in the book. A sent quote cannot then be edited: the customer is holding that number. What the customer sees is the price and the day it holds until; what stays behind is the blanks, the rates, the overhead and the margin.
Joinery shops and component makers of one to twenty people who price in a spreadsheet or by eye today — chairs, table tops, turned legs, contract work for a brand further up the chain.
Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia — anywhere the yard sells metric timber and the customer expects a piece of paper with a figure on it. The tool speaks eight languages, and the trade words in each are the trade's own: Rohmaß and Fertigmaß, ämne and hyvelmån, emne and høvlet, tarcica and naddatek, ruošinys and obliavimo užlaida, toorik and töötlemisvaru.
It keeps no stock. No packs, no consumption, no year-end reckoning — a quote is a price and nothing more, and it never becomes a stock entry. It draws nothing and drives no machine. And it does not read a comma as the end of a number: a European keyboard writes 0,5, and that is a half.
estifex.com → The whole manual, no account hello@vivifex.com