Exercise your Mind

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.

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.

I get home and finish working my fulltime job then head out to the shop to process the alder I picked up for the boxes.

As a reminder, these were overages/not quite good enough molding culls from Paxton Woods that I paid $0.22/lineal foot to buy.

My thought was that I would be able to use the planer to cut off the slight raised parts and then split the remaining into two parts and build these boxes out of 3/16″ wood. It started out fine. I created great piles of alder shavings in the driveway. Yes, I had to move out of the garage as I just didn’t have enough room to run 10′ boards through the planer.

Once i got it down flat I determined that there wasn’t any way that I was going to run a 10′ board through the table saw to split it into two parts, so I cut it into 5′ sections. The first cut through the board (with it on its side) went OK, but when I flipped it over it didn’t go quite as well. Then when I flipped it again it became painfully obvious that this was not going to work.

Even if this board went OK, there was a 0% chance that the next 55′ would go as well. So on to plan B – i created more shavings and processed the alder down to 3/8″ like the other boxes we’ve built.

I’ll have to measure (it started to sprinkle so I cleaned up) to be sure I have enough to finish these boxes. If not I have the piece of 8/4 alder that I can resaw down to 7/16-1/2″ and run through the planer to finish up. I’d rather make cubes from it, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

Just got back from Paxton’s Woods.

And like any addict, I want to brag about my “buy”

I hit up their “oops” rack for molding as when I was there before they had a bunch of alder molding that I can use for boxes for my puzzles. So there were 6 5/8 x 6 x 10 ft pieces and two 5/8 x 8 x 5 ft pieces of that. I also found hiding in there 6 7 foot and 1 9 foot 3/4 square oak “sticks”. That totaled a bit over $24 ($0.22/lineal foot.)

Then I hit the “scrap” bin. There I picked up 2.5 bd ft of hickory, 4 of alder (in an 8/4×4″ piece), 8.5 of maple, and another 3.5 of oak.

That ran me just under $9 ($0.50/bd ft.) Total.

I got a bunch of wood for $35 or so.

Now I have to figure out where to store it

There was a lot more there as well. Not sure why some of it was there, to be honest. Maybe just too short for them to use as molding.

The guy told me that once or twice a year there’s a guy that comes in and just buys the entire rack. He turns urns for pets so it doesn’t matter what the wood is, he just glues it up and turns away.

I had Friday off for the 4th of July holiday and I had planned on heading back to Paxton Woods to pick up that alder for the boxes. I figured I’d have a long weekend to build boxes for the puzzles. Since I had some running to do and one stop was close to Paxton’s, so took the truck and just figured that we’d stop by.

So we stopped by. And we were the only ones there.

They got Friday off for the holiday as well.

*sigh*

So I’m doing some site updates and I put all the pieces together for the Soma Cubes. We now have our 50 cubes all glued up and finished. I’m working on a sled so when I start processing the wood I pick up I can improve my accuracy.

So, not a wasted weekend – just a disappointing one.