Greetings everybody! I hope everyone had a fun, productive weekend! We surely did!

If you’ve been keeping up you know we left off last week in the middle of our puzzle preservation project and had our extra large cardboard format puzzles left to preserve in addition to one smaller (but gorgeous) wooden one by Nautilus Puzzles. This weekend we continued that project, ultimately using every drop of puzzle sealant and wood glue we owned. Large cardboard puzzles are thirsty product guzzlers so, beware!

You see us do many projects that don’t require the full expanse of our roughly 36×48 cutting field but this weekend was an exception in that we loaded 48”x 48” plywood into the laser, finally using the drop down “pass through” door. Prior to the build we went round and round about the size of the laser. You may recall that the more power/wattage you want the bigger your laser gets due to the length of the tube. Having the pass through as well as the hydraulic bed lift came in very handy this weekend with the 48”x48” plywood sheets for the backer/mounting boards.

If you watch the video you’ll see that we ran into some trouble with the 1/2” thick wood (nothing we couldn’t remedy) which is somewhat common in our experience due to the way big box store plywood is manufactured and the purposes for which it’s intended. But I thought it was a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the benefit of a pass through for anyone considering a build or buying a laser. It’s an option that gives you much more flexibility relative to the size of the project you can tackle.

As an aside, though I didn’t film it, I got to try my hand at spreading and torching epoxy this weekend; great fun AND it went well because I have a great teacher!

I digress. If you are interested in 1/2” plywood cuts and/or cutting with the pass through open, this video is for you!

As promised, a photo of the finished preservation of my tied for favorite puzzle, this leopard and hummingbird wood puzzle from Nautilus. They license so many beautiful works of art!

We now have two large cardboard puzzles ready for pouring but of course it’s Monday and duty calls; the moon always comes first ?????????.

The freezing temperatures are abating and the for the woodland creatures who endure this brutality a respite is in the offing. Have a great week out there and go make something awesome!

Dana