How It Works
From blank canvas to
cut-ready pattern.
RipSaw opens at the Shop Door, where you pick your workshop — Scroll Saw, Sign Making, Intarsia, or Segmentation. Every one is built around the physical realities of the craft: blade width, floating islands, real wood, and patterns that have to survive the cut. Here’s how a project comes together.
Four Workshops, One Tool
Pick a Shop Door.
RipSaw begins where every good build begins: at the door of the shop.
RipSaw launches into the Shop Door — a “what are we building?” launcher. Choose your workshop and the right tools are waiting. Your last five projects are a single click away.
Scroll Saw / Fretwork
Cut a design out of wood — fretwork, silhouettes, portraits, decorative cutouts. Draw your shapes, place bridges where the work needs them, and export a 1:1 pattern that survives the cut.
Sign Making
Lettering and scrollwork in the same workspace. Size text in real inches, arc it, circle it, fit it inside a shape, then convert it to scroll saw cut geometry.
Intarsia
A picture built from separate pieces of different real woods. Assign a wood species to each piece, set its grain direction, and meld the seams so they fit by construction.
Segmentation
The same piece-by-piece approach, cut from one board and stained or painted in different shades. Assign a flat color to each piece instead of a wood.
The Scroll Saw Workflow
From board to
finished cut.
Start from a real board.
Pick Scroll Saw at the Shop Door, then create your board — the physical blank you’re cutting from. Choose a rectangle, circle, or oval and size it in inches, not pixels. The board is the material boundary that island detection and pattern check measure against, and everything you draw from here fits inside it.
Choose your blade.
Pick your blade from the dropdown — #3, #5, #7, #9, spiral blades, and more. RipSaw uses your blade selection as the foundation of every calculation: cut-line width, bridge minimums, entry hole sizing. It’s what makes RipSaw different from general design software. A scroll saw pattern maker has to think in blade widths. RipSaw does.
Import a reference image.
Bring in a photo or drawing as your tracing guide. Adjust the opacity so you can see exactly what you’re tracing. The reference image stays behind your shapes and never appears in the preview or PDF.
Draw your cutouts.
Click to place anchor points and close the shape. Shift-click for smooth curves. Node editing lets you reshape anything — drag nodes, insert new points, fine-tune curves until the shape is exactly right. Crossing lines are rejected. RipSaw won’t commit a self-intersecting shape.
Cut lines and circles.
When you need a narrow interior cut rather than a full cutout, the cut line tool draws the stroke sized to your blade. The circle tools handle perfect round cutouts and outside-profile ring cuts. Place them, shape the nodes to follow the pattern’s natural flow, and what you see is what the blade has room to cut.
Add bridges where the work needs them.
RipSaw highlights floating islands in orange — pieces that would fall through because they’re not connected to anything. You decide where the bridges go. Draw them, shape them to follow the natural lines of the design, and blend them in so they read as part of it, not repairs to it.
RipSaw never auto-places bridges. That’s a craft decision.
Place entry holes.
Click inside any cutout to mark where you’ll enter the blade. RipSaw calculates the right drill bit size from your blade selection. Entry holes export as marked circles on the PDF.
Run pattern check.
Before you export, RipSaw checks for unresolved islands, missing entry holes, open paths, and anything else that would create a problem at the saw. The checks run across your full design — scrollwork and sign text together. They don’t auto-fix anything. You fix it, you check it, you own the result.
Export at actual size.
Export to PDF at 1:1 scale. Large patterns tile automatically across multiple pages with registration marks. The cover page shows your board size, blade selection, drill bit size, and total pages. Print at 100% / Actual Size, tape the pages together, attach to your board. What you designed is what you cut.
Sign Making
Build your sign —
or combine text and scrollwork.
A lot of scrollers combine lettering with decorative designs. RipSaw handles both in the same workspace.
Type your text, choose a font, size it in real inches. Arc it, circle it, run it straight. Fit text inside a shape you’ve already drawn — a scroll border, a decorative oval, any closed shape on the canvas. Weld overlapping letters for script fonts. Add scrollwork around the text before or after. When the whole design is where you want it, convert the text to cut geometry — with or without letter interiors. The letters become filled cutout shapes that work alongside everything else — island detection watches for letters that need bridges, pattern check runs on the full design, and export sends it all as one pattern.
- Text sized in real inches, not font points
- Straight, vertical, arc, and circle layout modes
- Fit text inside any closed shape on the canvas
- Weld overlapping letters for script fonts
- Convert to cut paths — with or without letter interiors
- Island detection works across text and scrollwork
- Same export workflow as the rest of your pattern
Intarsia & Segmentation
Build a picture from
separate pieces.
Two ways to build a picture out of separate pieces instead of one fretwork panel. In RipSaw they share one workspace and one set of tools — the only real difference is what goes on each piece.
Import your reference image and trace each region as a closed piece. Every piece becomes one cut piece of wood. In Intarsia, you give each piece a real wood species — 15 textures from walnut to purpleheart — and set its grain direction. In Segmentation, every piece is cut from the same board and assigned a flat stain color instead, each one listed with the nearest common stain family so you can match it at the store.
Seams fit by construction. Instead of lining up two separately drawn edges, you overlap the pieces on purpose where they meet and meld them — RipSaw trims them to one shared cut line that both pieces inherit, then locks them together so a finished seam can never drift apart.
- 15 real wood species for Intarsia — or 15 stain colors with nearest-stain-family guidance for Segmentation
- Grain arrows that set the grain direction and print on every piece
- Automatic piece numbering — 1, 2, 3, with no gaps, renumbered as you work
- Meld seams that trim overlapping pieces to one shared cut line
- Etch lines for surface detail — feathers, planks, score marks — that never cut
- A pattern packet built for assembled work: a material legend, a black-and-white assembly preview, and full-scale numbered part sheets at true cut size
One tool.
RipSaw handles the calculations. You handle the craft. Less computing. More scrolling.
Every cut.