Why a cutting company is named after the slot the cut leaves

1 September 2026 · KERF

It is the first question at every barbecue. Kerf? What's a kerf?

The kerf is the slot the blade leaves behind: the material the cut removes. Saw a plank in half and the two halves are a couple of millimetres shorter than the plank was, because the blade turned that couple of millimetres into sawdust. Every cutting process has one. A saw's kerf is wide, a waterjet's is about a millimetre of garnet-blasted slot, a laser's is finer still. It is the first thing any fabricator accounts for, because a part cut without allowing for the kerf comes out the wrong size, every time.

Ask a woodworker instead and you will get a different demonstration. Search the word and the whole first page is carpentry: rows of parallel kerf cuts partway through a board, so a rigid sheet of plywood suddenly bends into a curve. Same word, different trade, same idea. The kerf is where the material gives.

The name we nearly used

The company almost launched under a different name, one that described the promise instead: upload it, we cut it, we send it. It was accurate, and that was its problem. Half the category describes itself the same way, and a name built from the same words as everyone else's disappears into them. We spent a workshop's worth of evenings on alternatives, invented words, friendly words, very Australian words, and kept circling back to a stubborn preference: the name should come from the workshop floor, not from a branding exercise.

Kerf won because it is the most insider word in the category. Four letters. Every machinist, fabricator and serious maker knows exactly what it means, and respects a company that picked it. Everyone else gets a one-line story at that barbecue, which is not a bad way to be remembered. And for the record, it rhymes with surf.

The gap is the logo

Once the name was the material the cut removes, the identity designed itself. Look closely at the wordmark in the corner of this page: there is a single diagonal cut through the letters, the pieces shifted apart, a kerf through KERF. The little blue slash at the end of our headings is the same idea. The brand is built out of negative space, because that is what a kerf is, and honestly, because that is what you are paying for when anything gets cut. The slot is the work.

So the name is a small act of honesty about the craft. We deal in the kerf all day, on your files, in five metals, to 25 mm online and thicker on request, so that the parts that come out of it are exactly the size you drew. What's a kerf? It is the whole business.