Cutting wall lattice end pieces

Although my lattice wall sections are mostly made of the 6'6" slats cut to length and drilled previously, when you get to the end of a lattice section you have to cut these short to make a square end. You can see a few of the shorter wall slat boards that are used at the ends of a wall lattice in the photo above. A sixteen foot yurt has four wall sections. These four sections are joined in a complete circle with a 'joint' at each side of the door frame and three joints between adjacent wall sections.

The wall slats are cut at the ends to make a straight line vertically when the wall is standing upright. For the wall-to-wall joints, the cuts to each slat are made straight while those ends joining the door frame are cut at a 45 degree angle so they can be tied flush to the door frame. While you could just make the right number of 6'6" slats and then cut these to get the end pieces you need, my lumber situation dictated a bit more effort.

I started with 8' boards, so already with the standard slats I have a foot and a half of unfortunate waste. I've also lost more boards to flaws in the lumber than I expected. I only bought 5% more wood than I needed and that margin is starting to look scarily thin. Fortunately a bit of resourceful creativity can save the day.

My flawed boards had large knots or other problems in the center of their lengths that I didn't think I could work around. But then I realized that the shorter wall end pieces could be cut from either side of these flaws with minimal waste. You can only get one 6'6" length out of an 8' board, but you can make better use of the full 8' when carefully calculating which shorter lengths to double up together and cut out of 8' with hardly any waste. The end pieces come in lots of different lengths, so this flexibility was available. It took me a lot of extra time to measure, calculate, count, and double-check. But in the end I was able to get all the wall slats I needed out of my existing lumber without having to head back to the lumber yard, so it was a huge personal victory for me!