Show HN: I built a proper board foot calculator

As a developer who does woodworking on the weekends, I kept getting my lumber estimates wrong. Last year, a miscalculation on a walnut dining table cost me a lot of money and a frustrating trip to the lumber yard.

Existing online calculators were either too simplistic or required deep knowledge of obscure timber industry standards (like Doyle vs. International 1/4-Inch rules).

So I built my own: https://board-foot-calculator.xyz/

It's a suite of tools that handles nominal vs. actual dimensions, cost estimation, unit conversions (imperial/metric), and even log scaling.

The fun technical challenge was correctly implementing the historical scaling formulas. For example, the Doyle Log Rule (D-4)² × L / 16 isn't just a simple formula; it has specific exceptions for smaller logs. The International 1/4-Inch rule is a complex piecewise function. Getting these right required digging through old US Forest Service (USFS) documentation.

It's built with vanilla JS for speed and is fully responsive for use at the lumber yard.

My last project was a set of kitchen cabinets. The calculator estimated $800, my final cost was $785. It works.

Hope it's useful to other hackers who build things. Feedback is welcome.