Another Puzzle… But the puzzle is... “WHY?”

Boys and Girls,

For once I cannot blame this project onto C19, however, I can blame it on a 106 times removed, distant cousin C125.

While assembling my previous project, I came across some loose pieces left over from a 1 more previous project … I assembled it

and suddenly realised I had too many of them and decided to give some away as a present to friends and family.
Now my friends are weird and the family is weirder, I felt if I left any one off the distlist (distribution list) they'd throw a wobbly and stick pins into my voodoo doll effigy. Being both chicken and adverse to pain (not a good duck role model), I contemplated a workaround to minimise any potential painful demise of myself.

Armed with SketchUp, I decided to downsize the puzzle

to an economical 12mm x 30mm x 6mm,


Gallery pictures 2 and 3 will give you an indication of their size when compared to an Aussie 50¢ piece… and for all you non-Aussies that don't know the size, rest assured it's rather small but not too small…
With plenty of scrap MDF from previous laser projects, started to churn out a few copies of the puzzle.

Well this dumb arse went a tad overboard and churned out more than I could count and would even tax the limits of my calculator…

I then came up with a few combos like with/without sanding, with/without tunging, with/without staining

and being the lazy bastard that I am, I opted for all the withouts…

My ADHD cut in and I had to line up my ducks in a row and finished up assembling a ********************load of the puzzles



to the extent that I nearly remember how to do it without the cheat sheet… only had to peek after roughly every 10 or so assemblies.

Who to give to? I tested the water and gave a few away at my local supermarket, bemusingly saying "Merry Christmas"… My faith was suddenly restored as there are still some r-soles left after recovering from the second C19 wave here in Churchill… I actually got some "It's not Christmas yet" and "Don't you actually mean Happy Holidays" comments… My faith was somewhat restores as both comments were from the same person and for the sake of privacy (and potential litigation), I won't say what gender the mother was.

Choosing not to get belligerent with the parent(s) I kept handing them out and several kiddies asked what the solved puzzle looked like. I had an assembled puzzle in my pocket so I could satisfy their curiosity… chortling internally from the knowledge they'll forget it by the time they got home…
the Grinch lives.

Hmm… I didn't want to start writing up instructions and making house calls so after some brain storming I came up with the bright idea of etching the image of the solved puzzle onto one of the puzzle pieces itself,


Loaded some raw MDF into the laser and churned out 75 copies of one of the pieces with the image engraved on it



Bloody dumb move… the charing from the laser on the engraving had me reaching for the sander to clean it up… Having broken the surface of the MDF, for some ridiculous reason I then opted to tung oil them,

Now tung oil gets sucked up by MDF quicker than me with a cask of vino… so at least 2 coats would be required… Another brain wave… bugger tung oil (too expensive) I'll soak them in cheap BLO.



Bad move dummkopf… BLO doesn't soak in like tung oil and I spent the rest of the day wiping the excess off.

So now I have a mix of sweet smelling tung oiled puzzles (left) and stinking BLO ones (right) in gallery picture #6… People will know their placing on my friend hierarchy chain depending on the finish they finish with. I have a lot to distribute,


I then had to redesign my original cut-out for the next 1,000 I'm gonna churn out when I get bored.


To assist in the distribution, I started to bag them up into sets

using left over bags from my old pen kits… stockpiled as I use them as finger gloves for applying CA glue.

If you don't like reading you may choose to watch the video that tries to repeat the BS I spurted here.

Late addition.
Handing one of the puzzles out to the owner of a local small business, he was hooked on the puzzle and asked how much for 200… to hand out to selected customers…
I said no charge as the MDF was about $2 and the laser once fired up coul do it's thing unattended… churned out a first batch of 72 on my standard 300mm x 300mm piece of 6mm MDF board I have for basic laser work…





I should have charged as it took about 1 hour and worn skin and fingernails sanding 216 pieces on my upside down ROS and another hour to soak in BLO and pat dry the excess… I found that if left long enough after patting dry, the BLO eventually got absorbed.
I asked the chap if he could bundle the puzzles into their respective pieces for distribution

while I go home and work on the "next 1/2 " of his requirement. His reply was, "You expect ME to bundle them up for you?"… Well I have another 72 puzzle I have to find owners for… If you are in doubt… I was really pissed off!

Why is it that other LJ members always brag about getting stuff from friends (and strangers) for free… I have to bribe people to amass friends…

PS. These puzzles make great presents for enemies as well as friends…

Just make sure that for non-friends you bundle 3 of the same piece together and revel in their frustration in never being able to solve the puzzle…