Here's another gem from Steve Strickland !
IntroductionI cannot discuss puzzle making without first mentioning Stewart Coffin. Mr. Coffin's Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections is an excellent body of work. It is available on CD-ROM and should be acquired by anybody contemplating anything more than casual puzzle making.
Puzzle making is a very interesting activity. It makes demands on tools, machines, materials and craftsmen that stretch capabilities in ways not normally encountered in woodworking. If you like working in wood coupled with a good intellectual challenge, puzzle making just might be your thing. It's never boring and innovations are pouring out at an amazing rate. There are only a few practitioners of this arcane art yet there is a renaissance going on. The Golden Age of puzzle making is right now, this very moment! You can't read about it because it's not yet history but you can certainly participate in these exciting times.
I started on the path to puzzle making without knowing where I'd end up. I enjoyed constructing paper models of polyhedra, having constructed all the Platonics, Archimedeans, Keppler-Poinsots plus several of the Catalans and duals. My grandad once asked me how I expected to make any money building polyhedra. When I had no answer, I got a stern lecture on wasting time in worthless pursuits.
I didn't listen to my grandad and was on the lookout for literature on polyhedra when I found a dusty hardback copy of Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections on the very back shelf of a used bookstore in Austin, Texas. That book showed me the relationship between polyhedra and puzzles, a relationship I had never considered. I found it exhilirating that someone had a practical use for polyhedra. Unfortunately my grandad had passed away before I could tell him the book.
I decided to start making puzzles in wood. After a lot of early disappointments and a few modest successes, I worked up enough nerve to start a small puzzle company. The demands of building professional quality puzzles forced me to constantly refine my techniques. I also must learn how to teach puzzle making to my employees. This book is my way of sharing these ongoing experiences. This is the kind of book that doesn't have an ending. It's a description of exploration and experiment, a development technique, a learning curve. Improvement is a continous cycle so discovery continues after this book is published. I hope that you can devise your own technique of development and go on a journey of exploration and learning. It's truly a wonderful activity.
I had never done any woodworking before I started making puzzles. I didn't own any woodworking tools and didn't know anything about wood. This turned out to be a great benefit because I was not conditioned to seek solutions from the woodworking supply industry. Instead, I developed my own techniques derived from basic principles. I am fascinated that many of my techniques are the same in standard woodworking while some of my ideas appear to be new. A few ideas seem to contradict common woodworking knowlege. The contradictions indicate that there's something interesting going on, something worth investigating.
Here's an example. Everybody "knows" that wood will change size under varying environmental conditions. The size changes are too great to allow fine precision in woodworking so there's no point trying for critical tolerances. The standard solution is to allow for wood movement in furniture design. I've seen this argument extended to prove that high quality mechanical puzzles cannot be constructed in wood. Naturally, I am in strong disagreement with these ideas. I believe that the vast majority of wood movement is due to moisture migration, which can be greatly impeded with the proper finish.
There are several more main arguments against precision woodworking that I disagree with. That's partly because I was never taught these limits in the first place so I don't know any better. I'd rather check things out for myself. I don't accept any published limitations as being universal absolutes. In the furniture making business the experts really do know their stuff and what they say is valid. The overlooked fact is we're not making furniture. We're making puzzles where the rules are quite different. I most strongly urge the reader to experiment, find your own limits. When someone claims to have found the limits on what's possible in woodworking, get stubborn, refuse to accept it, and prove 'em wrong with a counter-example.
If you haven't done much woodworking you may be tempted to seek advice from folks who have been doing it for a while before you start. The standard advice is to attend a community college woodworking class, join a woodworking guild and buy the woodworking books/magazines. While these answers are well intentioned and not necessarily bad, they aren't particularly good, either. They're all based on furniture making and won't lead you to good puzzle making. The folks involved don't have any need for the precision that puzzles require and many hold the view that this precision is impossible to achieve. Please don't take me wrong here. There are some excellent woodworkers teaching and publishing, building magnificent furniture. A rare few are brilliant and innovative. It's simply that they aren't building polyhedral dissections.
The books, magazines, TV shows and tool catalogs are actually a lot of fun and usually worth the price. A couple of the Internet chat rooms are quite good as well. I'm not disrespecting any of these folks with my remarks. I am attempting to point out that rarely in the common literature will you find woodorking techniques for the kinds of tolerances required in puzzle making.
Many people equate "woodworking" with "furniture making". After all, the magazines, TV shows and books all use the two phrases interchangeably. I even do it in this book. Furniture making is not the whole of woodworking, it's just a small part. Limitations in furniture making do not define the limitations of puzzle making. Learn to recognize this error, you'll encounter it far too frequently. When a furniture maker says "woodworking" you should quietly translate that into "furniture making, not puzzle making".
Some folks will sit around and rationalize things to death. Theorizing certainly has its place, but lollygagging in idle speculation is "burning daylight" according to John Wayne. You'll have plenty of 'thinking time' available while running the machines and working on the assembly table. You'll learn more puzzle making in 10 minutes running the table saw than you will in 10 months of talking about the table saw. You can't learn to swim without getting wet.
Building puzzles rather than talking about them has another tangible benefit. I do my best work while working full time. I do my worst work after a long layoff. A regular work schedule results in better puzzles. You can't learn to swim well without getting wet a lot.
Puzzle making is an iterative process. This means you don't know exactly what to do first (the cause) until you see the result in a finished puzzle (the effect). You aren't going to get it right the first time. You make your best guess, build one, and see what's wrong with it. You then take the information from the first one, make an improvement, and build another one. The second one comes out better. In this way you use your experience to constantly improve. Reading about it won't help. Thinking about it won't help. Talking about it won't help. Only doing it helps. You might as well jump right in and start cutting wood because you aren't going to learn puzzle making until you do.
Puzzle making isn't for everybody. Don't be disappointed if you don't like it, just move on to something else. It requires a weird kind of dedication and persistance, some long term patience, plus an almost irrational belief that stubborn problems can be overcome with stubborn effort. I know first hand that this is not always true, but it's true often enough. If what you're trying just won't work, then try something else. Don't give up! Somewhere, somehow, there just has to be a solution! It might take years to find it, but you'll never get anywhere by giving up.
I've had folks call me everything from a fraud to a genius. I'm neither one, just a regular guy of normal intelligence. My work is the result of analytical thinking and hard work. A genius would get the thinking part done a lot better and not have to work as hard while a fraud wouldn't do any work at all. My thinking usually gets me somewhere near the ballpark, and then I make a series of incremental improvements using hard work. I would have no results at all without the work part.
Where do I get my ideas? My jig ideas are derived from established principles. They didn't arrive out of a vacuum like a revelation from God. I learned the kinematic principles (explained in detail later in the book) from a 1920's article on optical testing. I pay attention to everything that comes my way. Once in a while a really good idea comes along and I grab it.
My ideas are combinations and extensions of existing ideas, recast in the light of kinematics. I'm not any good at the genius business, but I am a fair to middling harvester of ideas.
The field of furniture making has been picked over making it a low yield place to farm for new ideas. Really new ideas just don't sprout up in the woodworking literature very often. You might be more successful spending your 'reading time' in other fields. I know that sounds a bit strange, so I'd better explain.
I mentioned earlier having read an old article on optical testers. From that article I got the idea of kinematics, which I then applied to jig design. I thought "Hey, this is working great so what else can I do with it"? I designed a kinematic micro-adjuster. "Hey, this thing works wonderfully! It's so simple, surely someone else has done it before."
After searching the literature and talking to some magazine editors and tool reviewers I conclude that the basic mechanical principles of my kinematic micro-adjuster have never been employed in woodworking at any level. Also, I've never seen the word "kinematic" appear in any of the woodworking literature. Of course I could be wrong, my research is not exhaustive. The main point here is all I did was read some stuff in other fields, see a good idea, and grab it. That's how an 80 year old optics article led me directly to some new ideas and devices in woodworking. Pretty nifty trick, huh?
Puzzle making is a wide open field, fertile grounds for innovation and new ideas. It's mostly an unexplored realm, an empty spot on the map of human knowlege. Stewart Coffin opened the door. Would you care to step through and go on an adventure, exploring the unknown? Sure you do! So let's get going, we're burning daylight!
By the way, if I meet my grandad in the hearafter I'll tell him how the polyhedra models worked out. I can almost hear him chuckle as he appreciates the sly way nature hid their practicality.
Steve Strickland
Author