My first puzzle; 28 pieces, not cut to any particular plan. I added the polycrylic top coat
after cutting, which make the pieces stick a little bit.
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These puzzles are cut from 1/4 plywood, with a scroll saw, for
my young son. The images used are either used with permission, or
licensed under appropriate creative commons licenses; my photographs
may be redistributed under the same terms as the originals.
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Page 3 (gifts)
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My first puzzle; 28 pieces, not cut to any particular plan. I added the polycrylic top coat
after cutting, which make the pieces stick a little bit.
Image Source
16 pieces; Denton could do this one on his own soon
after I gave it to him, in August 2009. I printed out a computer
generated mesh, and followed the lines, cutting the interlocks
freehand, to help hit my desired scale and level of complexity.
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20 pices, no dirty tricks. Denton could solve this one
by mid-fall 2009, but he doesn't like it nearly as much as he likes
the windmill.
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After witnessing Denton crawl around pretending to be a
chinook, with a leg swinging in the air to be a propellor, I thought
he'd want a chinook puzzle. 22 pieces. Denton can solve it with encouragement,
but no useful hints, as of late November 2009.
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I wanted to see how Denton would tackle a more traditional puzzle - he's been ignoring the image cues, and just matching by shape so far. I put a mesh of narrow masking tape strips over the board, and cut freehand into strips, then taped the strips back together and cut in the other direction.
It's been mastered, but is still a favorite, as of February
2010 (created in November); it seems to be roughly as hard as the
26-piece stunt plane.
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25 hexagonal pieces, with interlocks that fit into the frame. I made sure that all the combinatorical possibilities as far as knob/hole placement were represented.
As of February (he first tried in November), Denton still hasn't
mastered this one. He can make considerable progress, but it's easy
to have the right piece and just have it turned wrong for it to fit.
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35 pieces, which are roughly pairs or threesomes on a 1" grid.
I didn't get fancy with the knob/hole arrangement, but the piece
layout was auto-generated then hand-manipulated to fit my criteria.
Since there are 20 edge pieces, and some biggish areas of color, it
turns out to be fairly easy; Denton needed some encouragement, but
no real help on his first try at solving it (February 2010).
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Like the fish puzzle, Discovery Launch is 35 pieces, but the more
random layout and smaller color palette makes it a bit trickier.
I used a program to randomly space some points, so as to yield a
Voronoi tiling with pieces of approximately equal area (these pieces
are a little more varied in appearance than the close-to-hexagonal
pieces favored by the edge-length based algorithm). Denton gave
it a try, but lost interest quickly - I think we will also need to
encourage an interest in space exploration (February 2010).
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