R&D: Making a Puzzle

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since I watched the Simone Giertz video about the first Yetch Studio Edge Piece Puzzle, I’ve been wanting to make my own puzzle.
I mean, look at it - it is soo cute and whimsical. Heck, they even made a second one.
I don’t know - I think I just love the idea behind it. Maybe quirky is just my thing.

Well, not long after watching that video, a close friend of mine introduced me to another cool puzzle type, which has unusual puzzle piece shapes.
One of the puzzles we did was this Unidragon Whale Jigsaw Puzzle. If you look at the product photos on their website, you can see that their puzzle pieces aren’t the usual jigsaw squares with round connectors. Instead, their puzzle pieces are shaped according to a theme. In this case, you can find all sorts of underwater plants and animals.
Because you cannot make an entire puzzle with themed puzzle pieces, there are also a lot of random shapes to hold everything together.

As we were working on the puzzle, I just couldn’t stop thinking about making my own.
But as always, that requires research and testing.
Often, when I’m testing out new stuff, I disregard techniques, that don’t achieve the level of perfection I’m after. However, that doesn’t mean that the specific process might not be helpful or interesting to someone else, so I figured I’d take you all with me on a Research and Development journey ✨.

But first

There are plenty of videos available online detailing the process used to produce puzzles industrially.
Like this one on YouTube.

In contrast to the Unidragon puzzle I mentioned above, most large-scale commercial puzzles don’t use wood as a material.
Puzzles that are supposed to be extra durable, like ones made for kids, can be made out of wood. But a lot of the puzzles from recognizable brands (at least here in Germany), like Ravensburger Puzzle, are made from a thicker cardboard.

Whereas puzzles made from wood can be cut using a saw or a laser cutter, puzzles made from cardboard are often stamped using custom-made metal die cutters. This is a lot faster at scale, and you don’t have to fear ending up with burn marks.

I would love to follow along with the steps used by large-scale puzzle manufacturers, and make my own stamp to cut puzzle pieces, but as you can probably guess, I don’t have the materials or equipment to do so.

Instead, we will have to find something else.
This post will focus on three different techniques. The complexity will increase as we go along, so feel free to pick whatever technique you feel most comfortable with.

Shrink Plastic

Let’s start things off with the simplest method of them all: Shrink Plastic.
All you will need for this is a sheet of shrink plastic, coloured pencils, and an oven. If you own an inkjet printer and don’t want draw the design by hand, you can also get shrink plastic sheets, that can be printed on.

Shrink plastic is actually really cool, and apparently it was quite a trend twenty-or-so years ago (I haven’t checked tbh). I was introduced to it by an Evan and Katelyn YouTube video. And just like my brain always does, it immediately tried finding a use for it.
If you have never heard of shrink plastic before, let me get you up to speed: Shrink Plastic, as the name suggests, can shrink. When produced, it is rolled out almost paper-thin and contracts when you apply heat to it, causing it to shrink back to its original size.

There are a bunch of shrink plastic-related videos available online, and the process for making puzzle pieces is basically the same you would use when making charms.
You start off by drawing (or printing) your design onto the thin sheets.
Afterwards, you can easily cut the sheet using a utility knife or a pair of scissors. When making a puzzle, you can sketch out a simple puzzle piece pattern and simply cut your design apart along the lines.

After you cut out all the pieces, you can follow the instructions that come with your Shrink Plastic to make the pieces shrink.
In my case, this meant putting them in an oven at 200°C for about thirty seconds and pressing them flat afterwards.
I found that using an oven works better than using a hot air gun, as it results in more even pieces.

As you can see, the pieces came out a little wonky and slightly skewed, but they still fit together OK.
The colours have increased quite a bit in intensity through the process, as the shrinking process concentrates the color pigment.
Sadly, while I think that the method is the most approachable, the distortion of the pieces makes them unsuitable for puzzles with more than a few pieces, as they probably would not fit together properly in the end. Additionally, the rolled-out plastic sheets tend to rip when cut incorrectly, making it hard to cut out more complex shapes.

Mod Podge

Arguably, cutting out all pieces by hand is cumbersome and takes a lot of time.
Let’s say we have access to perfect puzzle pieces, be that by purchasing all-white puzzle pieces, or by laser cutting or 3D printing the pieces. Now we only need a way of getting our design onto the pieces.
Some of you might remember this from the It’s Canvas episode where we used Mod Podge to fix an image onto canvas.
Mod Podge works on most surfaces, so I figured we might as well use it to apply a laser printed graphic to our assembled puzzle.

🔵 Note

I actually made a more complex puzzle with this design, which I gave away.
It actually worked out really well, so I updated the notes below with references to it. The images you are seeing are based on a two-piece puzzle I got off Printables.

I decided to go with 3D printing because I’m more familiar with it than laser cutting and wanted to be able to design custom shapes.
As far as I can tell, you should also be able to buy a puzzle at a store, paint it white, and use the pieces. You just have to be more careful when working with water later, as you might destroy your puzzle pieces.

With your blank puzzle pieces procured, it is time to assemble the puzzle in place. I found that using a cardboard sheet covered in sticky tape can lock the pieces in place and prevent them from moving, which improves the overall alignment and leads to better results.
Next, mirror-print the desired image using a laser printer, cover it in Mod Podge, and position on the assembled puzzle pieces.
Finally, flip the assembly so that the puzzle pieces are on top of the printed paper to reduce the amount of Mod Podge between the puzzle pieces. The Mod Podge will take about 24 hours to cure, after which you can remove the paper by soaking it with water and rubbing it off using a wet sponge.
If you find that some of your puzzle pieces are stuck together, you can use a utility knife to help them come apart. This is probably easiest when using puzzle pieces made from plastic or laser-cut acrylic.

In my two-piece example, this left me with the two pieces you can see above.
The fit is just as you would expect from a 3D print, but in contrast to the shrink plastic, the puzzle pieces are actually flat.
All in all, the puzzle pieces feel nice, and the colors look pretty good as well.
In my opinion, 3D printing all the pieces just takes way too long, especially for larger puzzles.
I’m also concerned about the durability of the pieces, as the graphic started chipping off on some of them after doing the puzzle a couple of times. This could probably be prevented by sanding the 3D printed pieces at a lower grit or applying a top-coat, but I fear that this might make it harder to fit the pieces together properly.

Lasercutting & Stickers

After my successful attempt using my 3D printer and Mod Podge, I felt like trying two different machines.
For those of you following along, you will need the following supplies for this technique: an inkjet or laser printer, a laser cutter, a plotter, 3 mm plywood, and printable A4 sticker sheets that are compatible with your printer.

You might be wondering why you would use a plotter; let me explain.
When using a laser cutter, you often have to carefully configure the cutting speed and strength. Move the laser too fast or with too little strength, and the material won’t be cut properly. Move it too slowly or with too much power, and the material will end up with burn marks, and charred edges.
This becomes especially difficult when you introduce multiple materials into the same cutting process.
You might be able to glue the entire printed sticker sheet to the wood and cut them in one go, eliminating the risk for a plotter. But this makes the laser configuration more difficult, as you have to adjust the speed and intensity to pass through three different materials without leaving burn marks.
Instead, I opted to cut the wooden puzzle pieces separately from the design pieces and with the idea of glueing them together afterwards. While this increases the manual labor required, it hopefully increases the quality of the final result.

Honestly, I didn’t even bother to build a prototype with this technique. I’ve used the laser before to cut 3 mm plywood and know the cut settings for it, and I used the plotter to make stickers. So I went straight into designing the puzzle:
I imported one of the pictures I took when buying Avery, my plush duck, into Inkscape, matched the outline, added a few themed puzzle pieces, and filled the rest with chaotic puzzle pieces.
After finishing the SVG, I only had to send them off to the machines: while the laser was busy cutting the wooden pieces from leftover plywood, I printed the graphic on the sticker paper using my inkjet printer (with registration marks) and placed it in the plotter to cut. ¹

Once all the machines completed their tasks, I manually glued the correct stickers to every single puzzle piece.
As you can expect, this took a while, but I put on a podcast and powered through. And the result was totally worth it.

As you can hopefully see, the colors are a lot more vibrant than on the image printed with the laser printer².
I was also surprised how well the stickers adhered to the plywood - they are even sturdier than the Mod Podge.
If you were trying to make a puzzle at scale, this technique probably requires too much effort and is too error-prone, as the stickers have to be aligned perfectly. You also have to pay a lot of attention to the laser-cut settings to prevent the edges from burning.
But if you are trying to make a simple present, this might just be perfect.

Future Experiments?

I’ve only touched on a couple of ideas in this post, leaving room for future experiments.

There are quite a few obvious experiment:
Making a single-use puzzle where you get a sticker sheet, with randomly oriented sticker puzzle pieces. And have to glue them together properly.
I also haven’t tested how well using Mod Podge with laser-cut pieces would work, but from experience with Mod Podge on wooden beams, it should work ok.

The obvious next step would probably be trying to stick the entire printed sticker sheet onto plywood before laser cutting and cutting both of them at the same time.
As mentioned before, this probably requires a lot of testing to get a result that doesn’t burn the edges. The results would probably be worth it. But I’ll leave that for another time.

I guess that leaves just one more question: Can you make and solve the puzzle? ³