Exercise your Mind

An odd thing for a woodworker, no?

Well, in this case it makes sense. When we’re done putting puzzles together and in their box (which is open topped, at least for the moment) we have to have something to keep them contained. Originally we had planned on shrink wrapping them, but our first opportunity to sell our puzzles at a physical location was at a place that has a decided slant towards the natural and green side of things.

So, Cher and I figured that shrink wrapping might not be in our best interest. We decided to go with muslin bags. The first set of bags we sewed up I cut by hand. I had a cardboard template, drew the outline, cut them out with scissors and then Cher sewed them up. I threaded the drawstrings and put the beads on the ends.

This worked out well and was well accepted at the store.

Now it’s time to make more bags, but I know there has to be a better way to do this. I talked to a friend in the fabric business and she told me about the cutter and cutting mats. That’s in line for tomorrow – cutting up 4 yards of tea stained muslin so we can sew up some more bags.

Well, at least partly – it’s been through the skim cutting, but not yet sanded or cut into cubes.

Most of the koa was just undersized, so I’ll be saving that for later use in my 1/2″ cube based puzzles. This is not a reflection on the seller – these were extras thrown in to fill my box of wood and if I were actually turning pens they’d most likely be fine. Almost all of the mango was usable (and all the ones from the auction were), the red river gum was just a touch undersized (for me) and the tamarind and signature turned out just beautiful I’m going to have to find out how to get more of that.

So, here are the followup photos: taken after the skim cut on the saw. These are not wetted down at all.

koa: (hmmm, guess I didn’t get this one uploaded – I’ll fix this later

mango: some of the mango shows a bit of curl

tamarind: This showed some surprising color

red river gum:

signature: this was the most surprising. I’ll be very interested to see this with some finish on it to give it depth. Since I have some pieces that can’t be used due to the knot in them you’ll most likely see some waterloxed pictures tomorrow

So here’s what happened – since I cut wood into 3/4″ cubes, I don’t really need a lot to get started and I wanted to try out some new types. I figured that a relatively inexpensive way to try something out would be pen blanks. I’ve looked at pen blanks in the stores (Rockler, Woodcraft) but they tend to be just a bit undersized for my purposes so I went looking on EBay.

I found a bunch of auctions from a guy in Hawaii and tried a few. I found out that some of those blanks go for a lot of money. Well, he sells in packs of 10 and if you’re making custom pens it’s probably really not all that much money, but it’s more than I wanted to go on this first time around.

One nice thing about him is that he’ll throw in some extras of what he has around – I’m guessing it gets rid of some of his scrap and since it’s a flat rate box it doesn’t matter. It’s also nice because his are rough cut to about 7/8″ which gives me plenty of space to process them down to size. I took advantage of his offer to supersize the shipping and he’d throw in a bunch more different things.

So, here’s what I got when I won my 10 mango root pen blanks.

Mango Root Pen Blank

Koa pen blank

Red River Gum pen blank

Tamarind cutoff

I had to ask him what this next wood was as I was having great difficulties finding anything about it. He wrote what kind of wood each of the pieces was (a very big help, by the way) and this was labelled “signature”. You try looking for wood and signature and see if you find a tree of that name

Signature/Autograph flat grain

Signature/Autograph end grain

So, now I’m off to put these pieces through the saw, cut them down to my cube blanks. Once I get a smoother surface on them, I’ll wet them and show them once again.

Oh, in case you’re interested, you can find him on EBay as the seller named eganlaw and search for his pen and turning blanks using “joel* Hawaiian”.

I sort of feel bad about this – but on the other hand, it’s just sort of how things worked out.

In an effort to find ways to acquire some of the more exotic woods in a budget conscious manner, I’ve taken to looking at auctions of pen blanks on eBay. They’re about the right size and since it’s an auction you can set the limit on what you’re willing to pay and then just stick with it.

Sometimes you get a deal, sometimes you have to wait until the next time.

This time I got a deal. 3 Jatoba and 3 mahogany pen blanks, 6″ long. That’s about 7 or 8 cubes for me for each stick. The auction started at $0.01 and only had a few hours to go. I put in my max bid and the initial bid was put in for $0.01. No one else bid. I won for a total of $2.96 with shipping.

Why do I feel bad? It’s to go toward her first lathe.

Should I feel bad? That’s a different question entirely. It’s not like I cheated her in some way. After all, she set the opening bid. I do find it interesting that another auction, the same offering, starts at a higher minimum bid. Maybe she’s running a test, I don’t know.

At any rate, I guess what I’d take from here is that it’s OK to depend on the marketplace, but make sure you can get a reasonable return on what you’re offering to start with.

I just got word of an opportunity for our puzzle business.

Some time this week or next I should be getting some poplar in the mail.

So, I hear you saying – it’s poplar, what’s the big deal.

This poplar came from a tree that grew outside of Monticello. You know, the place where Thomas Jefferson lived. This is a tree that he had planted when he lived there, some of his writings mention it.

A bit earlier this year (or maybe last) the tree had to come down as it threatened the house. It was 12 feet in diameter, about 22 feet around. It had gone hollow inside and it was feared it just wasn’t strong enough any more. The wood I’ll be getting comes from a couple of limbs.

What, you ask, am I going to do with this? Make puzzles, of course – and my contact with the wood thinks they can get these puzzles into the Monticello gift shop. It’s not clear right now how much wood will be delivered as I’ll be getting the stuff that’s left over from his work that’s too small for him to use in the pieces that he’s making.

Even if the puzzles don’t get accepted for the gift shop – having puzzles made from a tree planted by a future president over 200 years ago will be an amazing thing.

Well, tried taking some puzzle photos again.

No joy.

I think that I’m cutting the Depth of Field too short, I’ll need to check my reference and give it another try. By increasing the DoF I think I can get better pictures. Or maybe there’s something about this whole thing I just don’t understand yet.

It could be my eyes. The photos I took today were all manual focus because the last set were auto focus and were a bit soft. I also discovered that my lens gets to a soft focus at >250mm or so, so I specifically stayed well below that today. It’s possible that my eyes just can’t do the fine focus well enough any more – that would not be good.

If you really want to see them, I put them up on my other site at ProductPhotography. These have had nothing but the default conversion from Canon RAW to full sized jpeg using ufraw-batch and then resized using convert from ImageMagick.

To me, the focus looks OK, but the back sides of the puzzles are too fuzzy and unfocused.

We have more puzzles than just the Pentomino sets (including an original design), and more ideas in the pipeline, but I have to get this photography stuff down pat before I start putting up more information on them. That’s going to have to be a priority over the next few days so we can get more stuff up and listed over on our store.

I’ve not been entirely pleased with the images I have here or over at the store.

I think I’ve resolved how to fix that (or, at the least, I’m headed in the right direction) so other updates here will be temporarily put on hold while I regenerate the images.

The plan is to have a Page on each type of puzzle that will have some discussion on it, plus other links to other places on the internet where a more complete discussion can be found.

Well, we do plan on selling some of the someday, so I’ve been looking around and trying to decide how best to accomplish that.

We plan on attending some local craft shows and such, but since we’d like the world to be our customer, that means on online store. We’ve been investigating the options and have come to a decision.

Being a computer guy, my first preference is to run my own setup entirely. There are a couple of issues with that, though. One, it takes time. As you can tell by the prolific writing on this site so far, writing stuff is not my strong suite. I need to get in to the habit of posting something up here more often.

We’ve decided to open up a store over on the Etsy site. It’s a site for handcrafted items, gets a lot more traffic than I will here, I don’t have to maintain it (well, of course I need to make sure all our products are listed and that sort of thing, but I don’t have to worry about the infrastructure part of it.)

So, if you’ve found us here, please visit us over at NoPieceLeftBehind.etsy.com to satisfy all your puzzle needs.

Sometimes Craigslist can be your friend.

I sometimes take a look at Craigslist to see what I can find. Last week I found something good.

There was an advert for some leftover wood. The gentleman had been doing some work in his house – shelves, cabinets, that sort of thing and had some wood left over. Monday I picked it up and it was much more than I had expected:

3/4 oak:
9″ x 10′, 7″ x 12′, 5″ x 10′, 5″ x 8′, 6″ x 5′, 5″ x 6′, 2″ x 7′,
11″ x 4′, 12″ x 4′, 4 pieces of 8/4 x 30″ (they looked like they were
supposed to be the legs of something as they have some mortising done to
them), 7/4 x 4″ x 3′, and assorted smaller pieces.

3/4″ soft maple:
8″ x 10′, 5″ x 9′

assorted bits of pine shelving.

Some of the assorted smaller pieces are too thin to use in our normal cube puzzles so I have something else in mind for them. Since I’m not entirely sure yet that I’ll be able to get permission to build them I’ll not go into more detail yet.

An amazing amount of wood. And Jeff’s only request? Remember him when we make our first million from our puzzles.

A very nice person (and he can now park in his garage again

Now that the Soma cubes for the movie are done, I spent a couple of hours out in the garage cutting up the already sized wood I picked up at Paxton’s. When I picked it up I thought it was oak, but once I started cutting it I changed my mind.

It sort of had the look of oak, but it was entirely the wrong color – a greenish gray. When I cut it I got little “shards” of wood. It also lacked the smell of fresh cut oak.

I hit up my experts on both the Charles Neil and the Eons woodworking sites. The consensus was that this is ash. So ash it is.

When I was done cutting up what I had, we ended up with enough little cubes for 18 3×3x3 puzzles and two pentomino sets. We’ll be building 6 each of Soma, 30 Minute, and Interlock puzzles, along with the two pentomino sets.

In addition to all of that, I have enough ends that are long enough to put together a notched packing puzzle as well.

And this was only the first of the wood that I picked up from Paxton’s – there’s a lot more yet to come.