Posts from — August 2009

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.

We now have 50 Soma Cube puzzles completed. Well, completed in that all the wood working is done. I need to print out the labels (they’re designed) and we’re working on the way to shrink wrap them. If all goes well, that will be done this afternoon.

We got a bit of a time extension as it turns out that some “movie business” pushed filming back to mid-September and that gave us a little slack time. We could have easily pushed through to completely finish these in the original time if that had been required.

We have some extra maple Soma Cubes available and I’ve been working on some other puzzles. I’m heading out to the garage as soon as I’m done posting this to work on a couple of jigs so I can cut up that lumber that I bought at Paxton’s and we can start building up an inventory of puzzles.

Hopefully our participation in the movie will draw some attention and get us a good start in our little business.

I’ll keep you posted.