Welcome to Five Frogs Woodworking

Welcome!!  This a website I have developed to increase my exposure to people interested in hand crafted jigsaw puzzles.  The website has actually been in existence since 2012, but has been pretty static since then.  I would make a small change here and there, but nothing really interesting.  My hosting service provided a basic drag and drop website builder, but it had a limit of 5 or 6 pages, and it was not very dynamic to work with.  As a puzzle builder, I would like to showcase the puzzles I have cut with pictures and explanations, and this drag and drop option was not flexible enough for my vision.

Now, however, I have rebuilt it based on WordPress and plan to keep it updated.  The biggest addition will be this blog page.  The other major addition will be an increased gallery of photographs of completed puzzles.  That will take some time to develop, so stay tuned!

What am I going to blog about?  There will be a couple of categories of posts.  One category will be current happenings in the shop.  Pictures of the current puzzle being cut, new images I find that might become future puzzles, that sort of thing.

The other category will cover the technical difficulties I have encountered in my journey.  It would seem that this is a simple process.  Glue a picture to a board and move the wood around the blade.  Pretty easy, right?!?  It quickly became apparent that there was much more involved to make a quality product.

My first puzzle images were attached to whatever inexpensive wood I could find using a cheap generic brand of spray glue in a can.  I soon discovered that you sometimes get what you pay for, and moved up to 3M brand.  Although a marked improvement, that still did not meet my long term needs.  Then, of course, there is a discussion of the wood options available and surface preparation of the wood.

Another example revolves around the brand of ink jet printer paper.  My early puzzles were made from calendars and posters. When I started printing my own images, I discovered that all printer paper is not the same.  Some brands of paper are actually prone to delaminating when subjected to the radical cuts of a jigsaw puzzle.  It is very frustrating to spend hours cutting a puzzle just to have problems with the printer paper coming apart!  Then, when I moved up in printers, I discovered the hard way that not all ink jet inks work on all printer papers.

The list goes on and on.  These are just a few examples of the topics I plan to address.  Some of these issues I have overcome through hours of research on-line and in the library, some have been resolved through experimentation (think 15 small simple puzzles each cut with a different style of saw blade and attached with different glues), some I have had some help with from other puzzle cutters.

I encourage you to check back periodically.  I hope you enjoy it!