FIVE FROGS WOODWORKING

There have been numerous postings about boxes on several puzzle related Facebook groups. Some people insist that custom puzzles deserve a wooden box, others detest wooden boxes. One fellow indicated that if the puzzle comes in a wooden box, he throws the box away and puts the puzzle in a box of his choosing. Some people indicate they do not like puzzles to come in a bag of any sort. Most people agree that the puzzles should not be in airtight plastic containers to prevent mold growth. Some people do not like cheap boxes, which I can truly understand. (I guess I use somewhat cheap boxes.) But, for every person who expresses an opinion one way, there is someone else who likes the opposite. As a puzzle cutter, I read these discussions with interest. I do need to keep my customers satisfied, after all. I had toyed with the idea of making wooden boxes until I saw how many negative comments there were about wooden puzzle boxes.

One set of Facebook comments concentrated on what the puzzle box should be able to withstand. One criterion was to be able to support 75 pounds of weight. I cannot argue for or against this seemingly arbitrary number. I shudder to think of a shelf of puzzles that have 75 pounds of weight on the puzzle boxes. My puzzles are usually under 2 pounds in weight, so that would be a stack of more than 38 puzzles piled towards the ceiling. Alternatively, I would hope that no one is keeping their dumbbells or curl bar on top of expensive puzzles!

The comments also indicated the lid should be firmly attached in a manner that is easy to get off but does not fall off easily if the box tumbles on the ground. Who wants to play 336-piece pickup keep away with a puzzle while there are two dogs in the room?

This particular discussion really piqued my interest. How much weight could one of my boxes endure? Would the puzzle box fly open when dropped? Are my boxes horrible? I set out to find some answers, which has led to this blog posting.

I use folding boxes that I buy through US Box. Here is an example of a box as it is received. The size of this particular box is 8″ x 8″ x 3″, which is my medium sized box. I also use 6″ x 6″ x 3″ and 10″ x 10″ x 6″ boxes of this same style.

These boxes are easy to assemble. First, you open them up.

Next, you start folding the bottom flaps down.

I have not done so before now, but I am going to start using a hot melt glue gun to glue these flaps together as I build the boxes. I have been applying a piece of packing tape to the inside flap. I will keep doing that as well.

For my first test, I am going to use this newly assembled 8 x 8 x 3 box. I am not going to tape it or glue it together, just put the lid on it. I am going to leave it empty, so the contents do not provide any structural support. And then I am going to start stacking known weights on top of it until it starts to deform or collapse.

I have a number of heavy boxes full of cast iron and lead. I use these to apply force to newly mounted puzzles while they are cooling down from the dry mount press. I weighed these individual boxes with a postal scale and then started stacking them on my empty puzzle box. This was the first box. This one is a cast iron vise that will be installed on my in-house work bench when I finish building it.

This next set of boxes weighs 21 pounds and 11 ounces. On the right side of the picture, you can see the first box above is stacked on the puzzle box.

This continued until I noticed deformation of the box. This was the last picture I remembered to take before it started to collapse, but it does not stop here. At this point, it has 67 pounds and 11 ounces piled on it. The box still looks nice and straight and square all around.

I continued stacking more boxes until the puzzle box started to fail. At this point, the box is supporting 124 pounds and 10 ounces of cast iron and lead. The stage before this one was 113 pounds and 2 ounces. So, these boxes do meet that arbitrary criterion of supporting 75 pounds.

Here is a side view of the collapsing box.

Another view.

With everything removed and the lid off, here is the inside of the box.

The next criterion was to not fall open and spill its contents when knocked off the counter. I took another new 8″ x 8″ x 3″ box for this test. I filled it with the multi-age unicorn puzzle from my last blog entry. It had been previously stored in a little plastic rubber maid container and needed an upgraded home. I decided it could be a potentially sacrificial test subject. It was already missing one piece, so….

As you can see, the box is only about one half full. That is a complaint I have noticed in the Facebook groups. People do not like it if the puzzle rattles around too much in the box. That is one of the nice things about these folding boxes. You can custom fit them to the size of the actual puzzle it is being used for. In this next picture, I am trimming the box to fit with a straight edge and a razor. (You can see the bent box from earlier, too.) When doing this, you do need to remember to leave room for tissue paper padding and whatever brochure or other paraphernalia you might enclose in the box with the puzzle.

I taped the bottom flap of the box like I have been doing with my puzzles up to this point.

I like to use a couple of sheets of tissue paper to line the box.

Next is to fill the box.

Fold the tissue paper over.

Next was to put a lid on it and smack it off the counter!

The first hit was not very hard. It only flew a couple of feet.

Not very exciting. I then smacked it harder, and it flew about 6 feet across the room. It would have gone farther, but it hit a metal stand that was in the way and fell to the floor early.

I tried it upside down as well.

It still stayed together. Pretty boring test.

How about if we put it on its side and make sure it tumbles as it falls?

This one had some different results! The lid came off the box.

I kind of pinched everything together and lifted it all up onto the counter. No pieces fell out onto the floor as I did this.

I gently opened the tissue paper, and shook everything, and the pieces all fell back into place in the box! Put the lid back on, and it is good to go! Wrapping it with the tissue paper helps to contain the pieces if the lid comes off. Some people put their pieces in a nice velvet/felt bag, which would be nice as well.

I ended up knocking the box on the floor 10 times while doing all this, so the box was starting to look a little rough at the end.

So, my cheap little boxes stand up pretty well. Are they the best thing? Of course not! I would love to use some nice sturdy boxes. On several occasions over the last 10 years, I have spent hours searching for a source of rigid stand up boxes that does not break my bank account or fill my space with empty boxes. Unfortunately, most box vendors want you to make a minimum order of 500 boxes. If you cut different sizes of puzzles, you would then need to order and stock maybe 3 sizes of boxes. 1500 boxes stored in my basement workshop! Or the guest room? Not happening! As one person has noted, I am not a prolific cutter of puzzles. I think the greatest number of puzzles I have cut in one year is on the order of 25 or so. With that many boxes and my low production rate, my future heirs would be dealing with stacks and stacks of empty boxes.

Furthermore, buying 500 boxes does not really make the empty box affordable to me. I have been quoted up to $20 a box, plus shipping! $10,000 (or $30,000 if you get three sizes) in boxes that my heirs can fight over! And, if it is a $200 puzzle, you just added 10% to the price of the puzzle.

I can buy a fairly decent box at the local Hobby Lobby for around $6, but they usually only have a couple of them in stock. If you need one for a small puzzle, the box will be a cube shape, which I do not care for. And, when I go back to get more, the box has somehow changed its shape. Or it now has polka dots and stripes. I really would like my boxes to be consistently colored and shaped. I think the white box with green lid is fairly recognizable to a few people.

I buy these boxes in three sizes, 50 at a time. They store flat other than the lids. The lids do take up space, but they can kind of accordion together and fit in a relatively small space. The ones I have been working my way through had green lids, but those are no longer available from this vendor. Future lids will be the same color of white as the boxes themselves.

I could rattle on about boxes. I have played with making wooden boxes. I have used little jewelry boxes for small puzzles. But this blog article was really about the boxes I do use and how they stand up to some torture tests. It has gone too long as it is.

Checkout the puzzles I may have listed on my Etsy store. FiveFrogsWoodworking – Etsy

Happy Puzzling!

Bob

This is a continuation of my last blog post. This project is taking longer than expected. I have cut seven of the different wood samples. I will post my findings of these seven, as I am not sure how long it will take me to get to the rest of them.

I decided to make these test puzzles as close to the same as possible. So, I cut them all using the same saw, the same brand, size, and style of sawblades, and the same puzzle piece style. These are all 8″ x 8″ blanks (except for one I will discuss when I get to it). I cut the puzzles using my DeWalt scroll saw with Pegas 2/0R MGT blades. I cut them in what I call the dragon tail piece style. They all seven have roughly 40 pieces (except for the smaller one).

The samples I have managed to cut at this point are the five varieties from the Boulter sample pack, a piece of cherry Appleply, and the piece of MDF core with maple face veneer. I also cut additional puzzles from the extra sapele, okoume, and meranti blanks. These three additional puzzles are not the dragon tails style of puzzle piece.

I share below my experiences with these woods. As always, these are my personal experiences. Others may disagree with me, which is fine. Some of the pictures you will see are greatly magnified to better show what I have learned. I took these magnified pictures with a Carson xOrb Digital Viewer which magnifies 68X on a 27″ monitor. They do not look as drastic in real life as some of these photos might indicate!

Meranti

I started with the meranti. It intrigued me due to its rather neutral look. It is not bland like Baltic birch but has a very consistent looking grain structure. It was lighter than some of the other woods. The piece on top in the below picture has Danish oil on it to bring out the grain.

I did discover that the surface was what a wood worker would call an “open grain”, which means it was rather porous. Open grain woods do not typically take stains very evenly. Even uncut and sanded, this surface was rough looking. This photo taken with my cell phone while I was sitting at the saw shows the open cell structure of the meranti wood.

I found this wood to splinter rather easily. I could see pieces flaking off along the grain as I was cutting it. This was on the top surface as I cut, which is where the teeth of the blade are pressing down into the wood. You often have splintering on the bottom side, but this was happening on the top side. The below photo was taken with my cell phone camera while cutting. This was the worst of all the woods tested for this.

The backside was much worse, with entire pieces being torn out. The picture below shows the worst incidence of this with a .5 mm mechanical pencil for comparison. Photo taken with zOrb.

Of the seven varieties discussed here, I feel this was the second weakest as far as structural strength. The first thing cut with these puzzles is the edge all around the puzzle. I tested all of the edge debris, and this was the second easiest to break. This was obviously not scientific with gauges and meters and such, but I did this to all seven plywood varieties using several pieces of debris from each puzzle.

This puzzle I opted to finish with acrylic spray paint. You can see how the grain structure did not allow for a very smooth surface. I do not think this hurts the puzzle but gives it maybe a rustic appearance.

Here is a closeup of the paint.

Also, the weakness of the wood was proven when removing the pieces from the sacrificial cardboard used while painting. One of the pieces broke! You can see it in the below picture as well as the above picture. I have glued it back together. It is probably stronger than it was but will always be a little weak. I will be listing this puzzle for sale on Etsy but will point out the broken and mended piece. It will be shipped with the adjacent piece inserted for support.

I was disappointed with the other puzzle I cut from this as well. The below picture is a little out of focus, but you can see all of the tear out from the bottom.

Here is a closeup some of the tear out.

I find this to be unacceptable. I have not made up my mind on what I will do with this puzzle. I have done nothing to finish it yet. It may just go in the kindling pile.

I personally will not buy any more meranti plywood for making puzzles.

Okoume

Next was the okoume. At 7mm, this was the thickest of the Boulter samples. The piece on top in the below picture has Danish oil on it to bring out the grain.

This wood was subject to a lot less splintering than the meranti was.

Here is a close up of the worst spot I could find on the top, with a .5mm pencil lead for comparison.

The bottom side was fuzzy, like most wood is after being cut with a saw.

Below is a picture of the edge cut done at the beginning of any my dragon tails puzzles. For this wood comparison test, I was breaking these in multiple locations to get a feel for the strength of the plywood. The okoume was as good as any of them.

I did find one location with a small void.

Here is the finished and painted puzzle. This puzzle will be listed on Etsy.

You can see the grain structure through the paint on the okoume as well, but it is much less severe than the meranti or the sapelle. Here is a close up.

I did a second puzzle with the okoume. It was cut in my usual piece style, but with a small frog border.

This puzzle I opted to finish with 5 different colors of Danish oil finish. This puzzle will be listed on Etsy.

I felt this was a decent plywood to work with for puzzle cutting. I have not found it locally, and I like the Appleply I have been using, so I probably will not be making many puzzles from it. If it was sourced locally, I would use it.

Sapelle

Next came the sapelle. The piece on top in the below picture has Danish oil finish applied to bring out the wood beauty.

This wood splintered on the top as it was cut, but nowhere nearly as bad as the meranti. The picture below shows one such location on the right by the .5mm pencil lead. It also shows a tip blow out on the left. Remember, this was taken with the zOrb device, and does not look bad to the naked eye.

The backside had some as well.

The finished puzzle is fine. You can see more grain structure than with the okoume, but less than the meranti.

Here is a close up.

The other panel, I cut differently and coated it with just a neutral Danish oil finish. I will probably list this on Etsy, but I am tempted to keep it for myself. I was unable to capture it with my photographic skills, but that piece shimmers in the light as you move it around. It is just flat out gorgeous in its iridescence.

I do notice with this wood that it is very difficult to pick this puzzle up to flip it over. There is almost no friction between the pieces and if you pick it up, it will fall apart. I have to use two pieces of cardboard to sandwich it to flip it over.

Like the okoume, I would not hesitate to use this in the future but would not go out of my way to obtain more.

Boulter provided cherry single ply core

This wood was extremely frustrating to me. I love cherry and had high hopes for this stuff. Like the previous wood selections, the top panel below has a coat of Danish oil finish on it.

This wood is very thin, and very light. It offers almost no resistance to the blade as you are cutting. It was almost like pushing through water or something. I found it to be uncontrollable. I could not spin the wood around the blade without over running my target. I ruined the first panel and tossed it in the fire. I started the second panel and gave up early. I could not even cut the edge of the puzzle off, much less attempt to cut the more challenging dragon tail pieces. I ended up cutting a chunk off to remove the evidence of my efforts.

I moved on to the Baltic birch. As I was cutting the Baltic birch, I decided to give this cherry another shot by using a dull blade. I cut in the Baltic birch until the blade was bending quite a bit from pushing hard enough to get it to cut. I then switched to the cherry and cut the entire puzzle (now smaller than desired) with one extremely dull blade.

I found that it did not have any splintering problems. Here is a representative picture of the top side taken with the zOrb showing the quality of the cut.

The backside was typically fuzzy.

I finished this puzzle using Danish oil.

The puzzle looks great. However, I find the wood to be very weak. The strength test I described above showed the wood to break with almost no effort at all. In fact, one of the pieces broke while I was just rubbing a little finish on it.

Yes, I can glue it, but I think it is symptomatic of problems the entire puzzle will have. I do not think I will list this for sale. I think it will be a loaner demo puzzle until it is nothing but splinters and toothpicks.

I found this wood to be unacceptable for my puzzle purposes.

Baltic Birch

I have used a lot of Baltic birch in the past and will use more in the future. It seems to be easy to find locally and is usually of fairly good quality.

One of the issues with Baltic birch is that sometimes it has a surface patch on it. The picture below is an example of such a patch. It is not shown in the above photo, but one of those panels does have a surface patch.

This sample of Baltic birch splintered quite a bit more than I expected it to. I have noticed this is becoming more common with the Baltic birch I have been using. A couple of other puzzle cutters have commented on this issue in a Facebook puzzle group I am a member of. This is one of the reasons I have been looking for a different wood to use. In the picture below, you can see the splintered wood laying on the surface, and to the left and slightly below that you can see the divot it came out of.

Here is the cut puzzle.

Since this is pretty boring wood, I opted to spray paint this one as well. You can see the grain lines show through the paint with this wood as well.

Here is a close up of the painted wood. Some of the grooves are natural to the wood, and a couple are from the missing splinters.

Here is the surface patch.

I have no problem using Baltic birch but was really looking for something better.

Cherry Appleply

This brings us to the cherry Appleply sample. This was top of my list going into this, and it has pretty much stayed there.

This stuff is a joy to cut. There is really no splintering top or bottom while cutting. This is the worst spot I could find on the top of the panel. Remember, this is magnified something like 60 times by the zOrb.

This is the worst spot I could find on the bottom of the panel. All of those whiskers go away with a little bit of sanding when done cutting. No divots or grooves left behind.

Here is the cut but unfinished puzzle.

I opted to finish this with 5 different shades of Danish oil. This picture does not do it justice.

Once the Danish oil finish has cured, this will be listed on Etsy. It is cool in my workspace right now, so it is taking longer to cure than I planned for.

MDF core maple panel

This was the big surprise for me. I tend to sneer at MDF for certain things, such as skinny puzzle pieces. This actually is a good product worth looking for more of. I apparently failed to get a standalone picture of the uncut panel, but here is the cut puzzle.

This stuff cut beautifully. It seems to be as strong as the majority of the plywood samples. It did produce much finer dust than the rest of them. Like the Appleply, splintering was basically non-existent. Here is a view of the top side.

And here is a view of the backside.

Light sanding after cutting removed all of the little whiskers.

Once again, I opted to finish this with five shades of Danish oil finish. This is a little bit different, as the previous examples finished with the Danish oil were on darker woods. This being maple, the same colors of finish produced wildly different results.

The difference is very subtle, but the light-colored pieces in the picture below are actually two different shades of finish.

This will also be listed on Etsy.

Summary

I still have more varieties of wood choices to cut. But from what I have done so far, the cherry Appleply is my wood of choice. Second to that would be the MDF core maple panel product. I think the Meranti and the single ply cherry core plywood are unacceptable for what I do.

As far as any hard analytical data, I kept records of the number of blades used and the amount of time spent on cutting each puzzle. They are listed in the table below. It is a pretty small sample size for real conclusions.

Note that the cutting time is not the vast majority of time spent on these overall. Applying finish, sanding, etc take up a considerable amount of time. Add in time for boxing, labeling, picture taking and editing for Etsy listings, creating the Etsy listing, etc, come close to doubling the time in some cases. The smaller the puzzle, the more relative “admin” time involved.

Some of these are already listed on my Etsy website at FiveFrogsWoodworking, and more will be as time moves on. I was hoping to get these listed earlier in the month to allow for more time before Christmas, but life sometimes interferes in manmade plans.

Happy Puzzling!

Bob

Boulter sample pack

The catalyst for this puzzle board comparison was the announced availability of sampler packs from Boulter Plywood with five 8″ x 8″ samples of different varieties of plywood. Dee Rogers on her Facebook group page explained that Chris Boulter had arranged for these sampler packs so puzzle cutters could try out five different types of plywood and see how they like them. BoulterPlywood.com

I thought “Why not?” In August, I finally got around to calling to order a sampler pack. It was pointed out that shipping costs might make it worthwhile to order more than one pack to reduce the impact per order. So, I ordered three packs. $24 of wood, and $17.20 in shipping charges from the east coast to the Spokane, Washington area. So that is 960 square inches of material for $41.20, or $6.18 per square foot. Just in comparison, two weeks later, I bought six 4′ x 4′ panels of Appleply from States Industries in Oregon. The total cost was $585.83 delivered (only $71 of that was shipping). That equates to $6.10 per square foot. The last Baltic birch I bought locally was $61.03 for a 5′ x 5′ panel, or $2.44 per square foot.

The price per square foot is probably not a fair comparison, as I suspect larger pieces from Boulter Plywood to here would be pretty expensive to ship. If you have a local lumber store or specialty store, that is probably your best source price wise. Many of them will also order wood they do not normally carry.

Here is a sampler pack. They are helpfully marked on one edge with a single letter corresponding to the species name.

Since I have three packs, I decided to put a coat of Danish Oil on one side of each variety to see what color is brought out. I also want to see if a finish of some sort reduces the amount of splintering on the back side of the puzzle while cutting, so the oiled samples will be cut with the oil side down (once the oil dries).

The Danish oil really brought out the grain and shows what the wood looks like. Well, except for the Baltic birch. Baltic Birch just looks… bland? The sapele sample is almost iridescent as you tilt it around in the light.

Okoume – Okoume comes from the central African country of Gabon. If you are interested, information about it is available on The Wood Database. I wanted to verify it is not listed on the bad list. It is shown as vulnerable but not on the CITES list. This particular sample is the thickest of them, advertised as 7mm. I measured all of the samples with a dial caliper, and this was actually 7mm. All layers are made of rotary cut okoume. This piece is marine grade plywood, meaning the adhesive meets a specific standard for being water and boil proof (WBP).

Sapelle – Sapelle is from tropical Africa. It is one of the very many woods often lumped together under the mahogany label, although it is not a true mahogany. The Wood Database has good information on it. Like the okoume, it is not listed on the CITES list, but is considered vulnerable. This is also a marine grade plywood. All layers are made of rotary cut sapelle.

Meranti – Meranti is one of many different species that is referred to as Philippine Mahogany, which is no relation to real mahogany from Honduras. It is found throughout Southeast Asia, and although some varieties are vulnerable, some Meranti comes from sustainable sources. Dark Red Meranti | The Wood Database. This is also a marine grade plywood. All layers are made of rotary cut meranti.

Boulter provided cherry – This is the first product examined that is made of two different materials. The outer face veneer is obviously cherry. It is plain sliced. The single inner veneer is poplar. Here are the Wood Database pages for both of those woods.

• Yellow poplar | The Wood Database,
• Poplar, Cottonwood, and Aspen: What’s What? | The Wood Database, and
• Black Cherry | The Wood Database (Hardwood) (wood-database.com).

Notice that most poplar wood used for furniture is not really poplar but comes from the tulip tree. Actual wood from a poplar tree is kind of a trash wood and is used for stuff like pallets, firewood, and making paper. Confusing, right?

This is the thinnest of the samples so far. In the edge view picture below, you can see how thin the face veneers are. Since there is only a single inner ply, I have included a view of both the end grain and the side grain of the inner ply.

Baltic birch – I have been able to easily find this just about everywhere I have lived (residences in 13 different locales in 40 years). Most of it is from nations in the Baltic area, such as Russia, Finland, etc. Baltic Birch | The Wood Database. Baltic birch is a great product even though it is visually boring. It is strong, stable, and flat. I have been using different thicknesses of it for years to make shop jigs, shop cabinets, shop tools, etc. I turned to the 1/4″ version to make puzzles when I decided to get serious about puzzles. All layers are made with rotary cut birch. You can see there are five fairly equally thick layers.

Appleply

Appleply is a product made in Oregon by States Industries. If you cannot find it locally, you can order it direct from ApplePly Hardwood Plywood. They are sometimes out of stock in the sheet size you want, but it may be available in other sizes. I buy the 4′ x 4′ sheets. If you do, I recommend you buy it in groups of four to get the most out of your shipping dollar. They ship them UPS in a big box with up to four sheets in one box. A nice protector sheet of packing material is between each plywood sheet, and edge protectors of thick hardened cardboard do a great job. I have ordered from them twice and have not been disappointed.

Appleply is made with inner layers of birch or alder. They have various options to choose from for the face veneer. I usually pick cherry, but I recently included a sheet of their white maple. There are a lot of maple species, but since they are located in the Pacific Northwest, I am going to assume they are using Bigleaf maple. I am also assuming the inner layers are rotary cut with the face layers plain cut. Some of the cherry I have has beautiful book matching grain. Here are the Wood Database pages for the new species introduced.

• Red Alder | The Wood Database
• Bigleaf maple | The Wood Database

You can see this wood has four inner veneers with two fairly thin face veneers.

Cabinet shop off-cuts

Cabinet grade plywood – There is a cabinet shop located nearby that makes and sells high quality cabinets to a nationwide market. They used to have an outlet store where you could obtain pallets full of scraps and quality reject wood pieces. By this I mean they would cut a drawer front, and if there was a small splinter it would be rejected. You might have a 6″ x 24″ of 3/4″ thick maple that was in good shape except for a little nick on one corner. I frequented this place quite often, as the wood projects I make are often of a smaller size. One time, I was able to pick up a pallet of sheet goods at a price that I still cannot believe. The 1/2″ thick panels are 2′ x 2′, and the 1/4″ panels are 16″ x 18″. The face veneers are maple, and I assume the inner layers are birch or alder. The 1/2″ sample has seven inner plies and two face veneers. The 1/4″ sample has three inner plies and two face veneers.

The stacks are considerably shorter than they were, but you can see there is quite a bit of plywood there. As an added bonus, they are finished on the good side with some sort of varnish or lacquer. I thought I was going to make unique puzzles from this, but the 1/2″ material is really too thick. I have sold a few, and exchanged some at a Puzzle Parley, but that is all. The 1/4″ plywood is quality wood but is not as good for puzzle making as Baltic birch and Appleply. I use scraps of it for practicing different or new puzzle piece styles. I will include one blank of each of this stuff in my little comparison project.

MDF core panels – included in the same pallet were some thinner panels that have an MDF core and face veneers of maple and alder. These are nominally about 3/16″. I have not used these for puzzles before but will include some in this test. If you look at the upper right-hand corner, you can see what happens if you sand this thin face veneer too long!

Miscellaneous scraps

Poking around through my scrap pile, I found some other pieces of material to use for this comparison test. I may not even cut these, depending on how done with the project I am by the time I get to them!

Construction grade plywood – This is a piece of 1/4″ construction grade plywood, like I made my first puzzles with. It has three layers of veneer made from some flavor of evergreen tree, like Douglas Fir or spruce or something.

Solid maple hardwood – This is actually a piece of a panel I made from 8/4 hardwood maple I resawed on my bandsaw. The maple was originally a scrap from making a poster bed for my daughter 30 years ago. This maple came from Steve Wall Lumber Co. in North Carolina. I bought it when we lived in Georgia and have been carrying the scraps around since then.

Masonite (hardboard) – I really searched for some solid hardboard to test as a puzzle. I did not find any. However, I did find a small piece of pegboard which is the same stuff with holes in it. Now, can I make a presentable puzzle from a piece of pegboard? I have no idea, but we might find out! The one drawback is that this is not 1/4″ hardboard, but rather 1/8″.

Cutting preparation

All of these samples (except the pegboard) were sanded on both sides (except any pre-finished sides were not sanded) up through 320 grit. The thickness of each sample was measured with a dial caliper both before sanding and after sanding. Each sanded panel was weighed. The results of the measurements can be seen in the below table. The red measurements are common measurements to use as reference to compare the various wood thicknesses to.

Please note that many woods are sold as a nominal measurement. In other words, a lot of material sold as 1/4″ is not actually 1/4″ thick. It is often 1/32″ thinner. So, if someone sells you a puzzle that is made of 1/4″ material, and you measure it and it is only 7/32″ thick, they were not lying to you. They told you the nominal thickness of the material. Another example of this would be if you go to the big box store and buy a 2 x 4 stud, you might think it will be 2″ thick and 4″ wide. No, that was the rough-cut measurement as it came out of the saws. Once it comes out of the saw, it is run through the planer to remove all the rough material and splinters. When it settles in the stack at the box store, it is nominally 1 1/2″ thick and 3 3/4″ wide. Note that is still a nominal measurement. Wood shrinks and swells, different sawing/planing machinery is set to different tolerances, etc.

So, that wraps this segment up. Now to take some time and go cut puzzles!

Happy Puzzling!

Bob

There are many possible materials to use for a good jigsaw puzzle. It is not always a form of wood, either. There are numerous examples of puzzles made from materials such as acrylic, thin metal, etc. Someone has recently made a Facebook post showing they cut a puzzle out of a sheet of embossed leather. I have even heard a rumor that cardboard puzzles exist! Gasp! Perish the thought!

In general, though, some form of wood is most commonly used as a base for a good puzzle with a positive tactile feeling. I am going to examine some of the options available, but certainly not all of them. As always with my posts, these are my results based on my personal experience, preferences, and prejudices. There is no one right answer. (And, my experiences are based on materials available in the U.S., other materials may be easier to find overseas.)

In the past, I have mainly used Baltic birch plywood when I make puzzles. I have not always been happy with the results with respect to how the wood performs. Baltic birch is good in that it is stable and strong. Recently, I have started using a product called Appleply with a cherry veneer on it. This is made by States Industries in Oregon. I like it better than Baltic birch. That is one of my prejudices I mentioned. I have been a woodworker since my age was in the single digits. My favorite wood is cherry, so I am always going to lean towards anything made of cherry.

But it may not be the best wood available for making puzzles. I have acquired a number of different samples of various sheet goods that I am going to use to make puzzles out of.

Before I start, maybe a little basic background.

Solid wood

This is exactly what it says. A piece of solid wood that is thin enough to make a puzzle with. A woodworker can take a slab of some wood, say maple, rip it to thin slices using a bandsaw, glue those sliced sections together at the edges, and make a wide and thin panel of solid wood. Solid wood presents some issues for the puzzle maker.

• may be subject to warping with moisture changes
• not strong enough across the grain – puzzle pieces might break easily
• may be expensive as compared to some other material
• time consuming to make panels big enough for a puzzle

Plywood

Plywood is an engineered material made from thin sheets of solid wood. The sheet thickness varies based on the intended use of the plywood. The thin sheets (called veneers or plies) are alternated by 90 degrees and stacked together with glue until the desired overall thickness is achieved. This eliminates the first two bullets above for solid wood. The inner layers of veneer are usually made from an inexpensive wood source. The outer layers (face veneers) are often made from a wood source valued for its appearance. Using thin veneers of expensive wood for the face veneers offsets the third bullet point above for solid wood.

Plywood can be broken down into so many different categories that it could fill a book to write about them all. The two most basic categories are construction grade and cabinet grade (or furniture grade). Construction grade plywood is made from softwood, often has thicker layers of veneer, and is full of knots and filled or unfilled voids. The 1/4″ thick stuff has 3 layers with no face veneer to it. It is ugly. Not what we want to use for a puzzle, but is actually what I started with when I first made puzzles for my grandmother.

Cabinet grade plywood is made from thinner layers of hardwood veneer. The inner layers are often made from rotary cut birch, poplar or aspen. The face veneer is often made from plain sliced hardwoods such as cherry, oak, walnut, etc.

This on-line article from Wood magazine explains the difference between rotary cut and plain sliced. What veneer patterns are available for plywood? | Wood (woodmagazine.com)

This is an interesting video on cutting rotary veneer in a modern plywood factory. Plywood Machinery | Veneer Rotary Line – YouTube

This one is from a more man-power intensive time. Manufacturing plywood boards

Cabinet grade plywood will have at least one very nice surface to it. The opposite surface may be of a lower appearance quality. The interior plies may have voids in them. Most lumber stores are going to have some inventory of cabinet grade plywood in stock. Here is an image of a piece of 1/4″ maple plywood showing a void. You can see it has three inner layers with two very thin layers of face veneer. The inner layers are probably birch, and the outer layers are maple. DO NOT sand too vigorously, or you will not have a face veneer left to look at.

That void is not something you want to discover while cutting a delicate puzzle piece. You can, of course, fill it with an appropriate filler material, but that is extra work you really do not want to need to do. That brings us to the good stuff!

Multi-ply

Multi-ply encompasses a short list of very high-quality plywood products: Baltic Birch, Finnish Birch, Russian Birch, Europly, and Appleply. There may be others. Baltic Birch is usually fairly easy to find locally, the others not so much. These products have much thinner veneer layers and are supposedly void free. (I will state that I have had to discard several pieces of Baltic Birch that DID have voids in it. It wasn’t just one or two. It was like working with Swiss cheese.) These are more expensive than the cabinet grade plywoods, but for puzzle making are worth the extra cost. Here is an image showing construction grade, cabinet grade, Baltic Birch, and Appleply for comparison.

The top piece is construction grade plywood, made of three plies of a softwood such as Douglass Fir. Next, is the same piece of cabinet grade plywood we saw previously, showing three layers of an inexpensive hardwood such as birch or poplar, with two very thin layers of maple as the outer veneers. The third item is Baltic Birch. It has five equally thick layers of birch. The bottom piece is Appleply, which has four inner layers of birch and two thinner outer layers of cherry (bottom layer is hard to see here).

Fiberboards

Here is where another one of my prejudices will be evident. I do not like fiberboard (fuzz wood, particle board, etc.) in most circumstances. It is heavier than real wood, it creates nasty dust, it does not do well with moisture, does not hold fasteners well, and typically is not as strong as the equivalent sized plywood.

However, it does have some advantages. If you have ever painted a piece of wood, you realize that the wood grain shows through the paint. Some of the fiberboard sheet goods are perfect if you want to paint your product. Additionally, many of the fiberboard materials are perfectly smooth and flat and remain so as long as properly supported.

There are a lot of varieties of fiberboard available. Some are purely for construction projects and would be totally inappropriate for a puzzle. One example would be OSB (Oriented Strand Board). Another would be particle board. I think particle board in a 1/4″ thickness would just essentially crumble if cut into puzzle pieces.

Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF) – This is made from very fine pieces of wood fiber that are mixed with a resin and formed into sheets under intense pressure. There are no voids, and it is almost perfectly flat. Very easy to paint with no wood grain showing through. I have not used this for a puzzle, but others do. I do not have a piece of this and am not going to go buy a 4′ x 8′ sheet just to make a small 8″ x 8″ test puzzle.

Medium Density Overlay (MDO) – This material has great potential in my eyes. It has a wooden veneer core like the plywoods above, but the outer face layers are made of MDF. This gives the strength and resilience of plywood, with the paintability of MDF. A lot of outdoor signage is made from this material. Unfortunately, I have not been able to lay my hands on a sample.

Melamine – this has a particle board core but has face veneers made of a plastic resin like material. I would avoid this. Particle board is not particularly strong, and the plastic resin face veneers chip very easily and eat circular saw blades like crazy. I cannot image scroll saw blades doing well with this.

Hardboard (Masonite) – This is also made from fine pieces of wood fiber mixed with resin. Unlike most fiberboard, it is somewhat flexible when still in the large sheet size. This is what pegboard is made of but is available in solid sheets without all the holes in it. It comes in 1/8″ and 1/4″ thicknesses. I used to have some for making patterns that I wanted to repeat, such as for tracing out Queen Anne furniture legs to cut on the band saw. If I can find a piece in my scrap pile, I will add it to the sample list. It can be brittle, so maybe not a good puzzle material. Might be a good choice for painting pieces, though. Some of the laser cut puzzles I have acquired seem to be made with this material or something very similar.

MDF core – This is a product that has a core of MDF but is covered with face veneer of wood. I have some of this in maple and alder. I have never used it for a puzzle, but I will cut a test puzzle from it.

This link leads to a good summary of all the above and more. Woodcraft Magazine

Well, this is a long post. I think I am going to be into another three-part post series here. My next one will be details about the samples I am going to cut, and then the third one will be about the discoveries made while cutting them.

Happy Puzzling!

Bob

Well, I thought I was done writing about scroll saws. I really had nothing else to say, unless I was presented with an opportunity to use someone else’s saw to cut a similar puzzle. However, I received a couple of comments about blade movement that I ended up delving farther into. These comments were about how the Pegas and similar saws can be adjusted to make blade movement almost go away.

That really troubled me, as the geometry of the short arms moving through an arc is going to make for more blade movement fore and aft on the saw than the longer arms of the parallel arm saws. I found this video by Steve Good of the Scrollsaw Workshop. It is a good video about the DeWalt specifically and worth watching.

So, I decided to measure the amount of actual movement of my own DeWalt saw. I have a set up gauge with a magnetic mount. I placed a small steel rule in the blade clamps to ensure that any flexing of the blade did not contaminate the results.

Next, I used a screwdriver to manually turn the saw motor to slowly move the pivot arms.

Next, I moved the motor to one extreme of blade movement, and zeroed out the gauge.

Then, I rotated the motor to determine the maximum amount of blade deflection.

.036″ of an inch blade movement! Wow! That is basically double the theoretical .018″ I previously calculated. That calculation was based on the assumption that the arc motion of the blade started out at 0 degrees deflection and was split evenly up and down from that point. It turns out that is the best-case scenario. What if the blade starts out at 0 degrees deflection and the entire movement is either up or down? Time to get out the calculator again.

Now, using my previous calculations, we have a range of back-and-forth motion of the blade from best case to worst case.

DeWalt is from .018″ to .073″. Mine measured at .036″.

Hawk G426 is from .005″ to .020″. Mine measured at .009″.

Shopsmith is from .006″ to .022″. Did not get measured.

You can see the best-case scenario for the DeWalt is basically equivalent to the worst-case scenario for either the Hawk or the Shopsmith.

In the previously referenced video by Steve Good, at about time mark 3:21, he discusses adjusting the motor on the Seyco saw to minimize this movement. He mentions that the adjustment raises the upper arm (or conversely, lowers it). At about time mark 4:27, he comments that the Type 1 DeWalt’s seemed to have better manufacturing tolerances than the Type 2 DeWalt’s and generally have less blade motion. I have no personal experience with this, so take it for what it is worth.

In this other video, Steve Good reviews a pre-production version of the Pegas scroll saw. At about time mark 6:31, he starts discussing adjustment of the fore to back blade movement on that brand of saw. Notice there are two different adjustments that can be made.

I do not have an adjustable version of these saws. However, it appears to me the adjustment just allows you to move from the high end of the range to the low end of the range. The geometry of the movement of the short arms of the double parallel link system is still going to result in more blade movement than the longer arms of a parallel arm scroll saw.

Does this mean one is better than the other? No, not at all. It depends on what you are looking for and at what cost. The DeWalt is a great saw and I have been using mine for years and been happy with it. Now that I know about the issue, though, it is probably going to bug me! I wish I could adjust it down to the lower end of the range. For the most part, the DeWalt may remain my go-to saw for most of my puzzle cutting. The blade changes are faster, and it cuts faster because it cuts more aggressively. However, for some pieces, the Hawk will be the go-to saw. The Dragon Tail pieces are much easier to cut on the Hawk. My frog signature piece can be challenging to cut with the DeWalt blade jumping around like it does. For example, look at the picture below:

If you look at the right leg where it meets the body, that gouge is from the blade jumping back and forth as I spin the wood around the blade, trying to get a nice clean point. Compare that to the picture below, which is almost perfect.

This was also cut on the DeWalt, but the blade speed was dialed waaay down to give me more time to spin the wood.

Once I figure out how to resolve the MGT reverse tooth blade issue on the Hawk, it may become my preferred saw. All three of these saws are perfectly fine saws for cutting. Each fulfills a different need. I have a pickup truck for hauling loads, a Tahoe for hauling people, and a convertible sporty car for hauling @$& and having fun! And, I have a DeWalt for fast simple cutting and a Hawk for very detailed cutting!

At the time of this writing, there is one Dragon Tails puzzle listed on Etsy. This puzzle was cut in the testing of the three saws. FiveFrogsWoodworking – Etsy

Happy Puzzling!

Bob