CNC Laser Cutting Custom Interlocking Puzzle Pieces
There are so many applications for perfectly symmetrical shapes (2D and 3D) from corporate wall mounts to show team unity to small items for kids to play, I thought I’d just do a video showcasing CNCROi.com making one.
The main lesson I hope you take away from this post is that optimal layout of a design saves you a lot of money in both materials and laser time. It’s the ultimate ROI (return-on-investment)!
This was a school project where we had to manufacture 32 custom interlocking puzzle pieces for the class, the students will be putting their own drawing into the rectangular hole AND painting it, hence not putting any protective mask on the front or back of this plywood.
As always, the inner holes are already cut out before the outline so that the finished pieces are all identical, this can be done infinitely as the puzzle pieces were designed by us to interlock top to bottom and side to side.
Although plywood was used to make these custom interlocking puzzle pieces, this could have just as easily been Corian, Stainless Steel, solid wood, laminate, acrylic or any other material out there. Plywood is great though, it’s relatively cheap, cuts fast (saving more money) and abundantly available.
Plywood is also very easy to paint and has very little splinters, especially when cut with our Austrian industrial wide-format laser. These custom interlocking puzzle pieces will look great after the students have had their creativity with them.
You can now see these custom interlocking puzzle pieces coming together, to jump back into applications, if these were painted white or any other color, they would make fantastic picture frames, if the application didn’t call on any painting, we’d use masking so that there wouldn’t be any soot or smoke stains on the surface.
For this project, the custom interlocking puzzle pieces where cut out of two different plywood colors, just to show a bit of contrast for you, the reader and besides, it looks neat seeing different puzzle pieces coming together.
In this project, we only CNC laser cut the custom interlocking puzzle pieces, we could have easily engraved them as well or made them to any scale, a meter wide or an inch – it makes no difference to us.
After the laser is done cutting the custom interlocking puzzle pieces, all we do is slide the sheet of plywood forward, we could technically open up the back as well as the front but in this case, it isn’t needed as the off-cuts are easily broken and the sheet fed forward.
Above is a cherry like finish piece of plywood and below, the identical design using birch plywood. In this case, the interlock were made symmetrical but they can be done however you wish, we can easily cut out an entire puzzle of thousands of pieces where each piece fits only one way.
Putting the custom interlocking puzzle pieces together though looks great, it really showcases the accuracy, precision and repeatability of our top of the line CNC laser (and router). The fact that these four pieces were cut at different times yet still interlock shows you why CNCROi.com is at the top when it comes to custom CNC services.
Want some custom puzzle pieces produce or anything else that’s symmetrical or asymmetrical? Contact CNCROi.com today!
