This mounted print has been waiting to be cut for a couple of months now. It is entitled “Meeting of the Minds” by David Galchatt. It was purchased by a customer and shipped here for me to turn into a puzzle. I mounted the print on a beautiful piece of cherry Appleply. After I pulled it out of the press, I discovered that there was apparently some residual adhesive on my release paper from the last project. It bonded to the print, and I could not cleanly remove it. I tried heating it with a heat gun, which just caused problems with the print mount to the plywood. I tried scraping it off, which guess what!?! Caused problems with the surface of the image. The picture below shows one instance of this, but there a couple of these on the puzzle surface.
I ended up ordering a new print myself and using that to replace the one I goobered up. That puzzle was cut and shipped off to the customer months ago.
Normally, when I have a problem like this, I will just burn the offending item. But that is really a pretty piece of cherry, so I could not bring myself to do it.
Instead, I thought I would cut it up as a personal use puzzle. Maybe it will be a Christmas gift to a family member. I do not have a problem with giving it as a gift, but when someone is paying a fair amount of money for a nice puzzle, I want it as close to perfect as possible.
I then thought I would make it a kind of demonstration puzzle, showing several different styles of piece cuts. So, I first cut it into quarters. On a larger puzzle like this, that is what normally happens any way.
Each quarter then was cut with a different style of piece.
Once it was cut, I brought it up to the house and vacuumed the dust off. I have a wooden frame with window screen mounted to it. This allows me to vacuum the cut puzzle.
Once it was vacuumed, I applied three coats of Danish Oil to the back to bring out the grain of the cherry. Now I will disassemble it, let it dry for 3 or 4 days, make a final piece count, and box it.
As I implied above, this is NOT available on Etsy. If you would like something similar to it, please contact me via email to discuss specifics. You can order any print you like from one of the on-line vendors and have it shipped directly to me to be cut into a puzzle.
My next project/blog post will be about plywood. There are a lot of different types of sheet goods that may be good for puzzle use. I will discuss some of them, give some specifics on the materials I use, and then cut some small 8 x 8 puzzles. I think I have eleven different pieces of sheet goods to test and provide observations about.
Happy Puzzling!
Bob