Vectric Customer

I would like thank Edward Powell at Vectric for his inspiration and presentation about 3D jigsaw puzzle making at the User Group Meeting 2018. The picture below shows I was successful. I also created a written procedure which may help others also create a puzzle and will help me remember what to do in the future when trying to repeat the process.
George

Nice work George. Thanks for sharing the procedures. Wish I could have made the conference.

Very nice! Glad to see someone using the technique Edward showed us!

Thanks for sharing, George.

Nicely done George, I made one but didn't post it on here because it was made using a user group meeting tutorial

Very Cool, Nice to see you have made use of this cool technique! Thanks for Sharing!

Looks great George
Roger

Here's another example of a puzzle using the technique illustrated at the Chicago User Group 2018.

The puzzle was created as a Christmas gift for a relative. It consists of 176 pieces and was made from a variety of cherry and maple pieces. All puzzle pieces were cut with a 1/8" 2 flute up-cut endmill. To allow proper fit of the pieces, the allowance between pieces was set to -0.005". The graphics were V-carved with a 30 deg V-bit and 0.10" max depth. Coloring was done with spray-on and hand-applied ink followed by a poly clear coat.

Lessons learned:
1)
Next time I'll use a down cut endmill. An up-cut endmill was used to clear the flat areas during V-carving. But, it has a tendency to pull the small puzzle pieces from the table. This led to lesson 2.
2)
Because the up-cut endmill had a tendency to pull the pieces up, I had to resort to carpet tape with aggressive adhesive. The downside was it took a very very long time to remove the adhesive from all 176 pieces. Next time, if a do a project with this many tiny pieces, I'll fabricate a vacuum hold down.

nurb

Now that is impressive
What is the overal size & how easy was it to put the pieces together after cutting before you carved it? I did one after the UK user group meeting but it's only 9 pieces, just did a simple one for my Grand Daugher

The overall size is 24"x16". The pieces actually fit together quite nicely and the puzzle maintained its "squareness" even when fully assembled. I attribute it to two things:

1)
Before starting, I made sure the CNC table was perfectly square and trammed the spindle to ensure the pieces slid together with no off-angles.
2)
I dialed in the allowance offset between the pieces with some trial runs before settling on -0.005". It was actually set looser at -0.008" to begin with but there was too much slop and the pieces were too loose when assembled.

The overall size is 24"x16". The pieces actually fit together quite nicely and the puzzle maintained its "squareness" even when fully assembled. I attribute it to two things:

Haha, I wasn't refering to the fit, t was the thought of all those bits on the table with absolutely no clues as to how it all went together
I only had 9 pieces so 4 corners only left me with 5 bits & only one with no straight edge

I did the same thing, ran a couple of pieces as a test fit although I allowed a bit of slop in mine, didn't want it to be to tight a fit with it being for a 3 year old