My wife has been doing a tricky 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle, and roped me in to help. While pondering the differing pieces I wondered how they are mas produced. Do they have a series of wiggly guillotine blades to first cut in one direction, and then rotate through 90 degrees and repeat? If so how are the blades made?
Someone must know!! HowStuffWorks was no help.
phil
I imagine they are stamped in one go.
Si
Looks like you want one of these....
email me at richard at olifant d-ot co do-t uk
... but with what?
phil
No, just curious - and at nearly $17,000 to get a 500 piece machine, its just as well. Our puzzle is 1000 pieces.
not very clear. Next question - how do they make and assemble the cutter blades.
phil
If you look at a puzzle piece you will see that one face is indented slightly. This is the face the stamper hit (usually the picture face). This means you need one stamp for each size of puzzle, regardless of picture and is far quicker than using a jigsaw or scroll saw as was originally done.
Peter
The cardboard ones are definitely die cut.
Plywood ones are sawn on a bandsaw I think. Much more expensive.
Big press and hardened steel blades.
What he said.
:o)
Si
Looks a bit like a blind pastry cutter. I presume you could machine one from solid on a CNC end mill, or perhaps start from an casting of some sort if you were making lots of cutters.
You could even spot weld some pressed crinkled steel sheet to a flat plate. and grind it flat I suspect.
One of the first large markets for laser cutting was to make this sort of tooling. You cut narrow slots in plywood, then fill them with "razor blade on a roll"
-- Smert' spamionam
Fascinating.
How long does it last?
In my experience razor blades only last for one shave. But there again, Spouse has only shaved once in thirty odd years. That was last year and it was such a terrible experience for both of us that he threw away the razor, a modern ones, not a 30yo one!
Mary
Crosland Cutters, it's an oldish site, so some of the details may have changed:
Plywood jigsaws? Never seen those. Must come from a poor family. :(
Well, aside from the ways it has been done to date (saws and dies, depending on age/materials), I'd imagine laser is going to feature in the future, and once it does, then the door will be open for some fiendish new patterns in the cut to be used, and irregular variations, which could make them even more challenging! Having said this, the die on card gives a nice curved bevel edge and this must ease fitting parts together, and laser probably could not reproduce that, mind you used on the right materials, who knows.
Take Care, Gnube {too thick for linux}
I've seen some very intricate patterns cut into plastics and steel using a laser, and very quickly too. Laser's even keep the Internet running at high speeds. Laser's are now used for many, many, many types of cutting, measuring, spying, welding, etc. etc. ad infinitum, and it wouldn't surprise me if the backing board for the jigsaw puzzle in question was actually cut using a laser, then had the picture pasted to it.
Aww, c'mon guys, lasers; plywood???? I don't think so. Have you seen how neatly the card pieces are cut. It must be done with a thin blade pressed into it, like a wiggly 2-D guillotine.
Take a look at the link that RichardS gave in Message , Mon, 29 Sep 2003 16:31:14
+0100-- Phil Addison The uk.d-i-y FAQ is at
A few years ago I was fortunate to be invited to the sheet metal plant in Swindon where they pressed whole sides of a vehicle in huge presses (we are talking presses which are 30 feet tall and with massive pressure available). Basically a sheet of flat metal goes in one side, the press thumps down, and you've got half a Jaguar XJ6 coming out the other side. Literally.
So for something doddly like cutting a sheet of firm cardboard I can't see it being an issue, if you've got a tool-hard cutting template which can be forced down (and you wouldn't need a huge stamping machine either).
Never seen this, but I would have thought it might be possible that instead of having a flat plate which stamps out the jigsaw you instead have the template on a roller, feed your cardboard jigsaw in one side and the roller imposes the jigsaw cutouts as it passes through. In that arrangement you wouldn't need so much pressure and the machine could conceivably be that much smaller.
PoP
Are you sure it's a crossed-over die? I'd be tempted to use a simple parallel-wiggly-line die repeatedly.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.