Cartoon Wednesday (Very Late)

 

Victory Over Gold - Gold Box LImited Edition

Not only do I enjoy the process of cutting out wood jigsaw puzzles I also enjoy putting them together! One of the puzzle cutters that I follow is Mark Cappitella. He owns Pinnacle Puzzles (also MGC puzzles) and I really admire his work. He definitely has had an impact on how I cut my own puzzles. I have always wanted to get a puzzle from him but he is a bit out of my price range (similar to Stave Puzzles). However, he has cut a couple of puzzles for Victory Puzzles out of the UK. They take his master cut and translate it into a file to create a laser cut version of his design. He showed some of his work cutting out Victory Over Gold (celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings) on his youtube channel. Victory announced this as a Limited Edition puzzle for $135 dollars, still painful but doable and I put in my order that puzzle.

I received this back in November but hadn't had the time to pull it out till last week. It was everything I hoped for. A fantastic image cut by a master puzzle maker and it had me scratching my head for about a week. I loved every minute of it. Definitely one of the hardest puzzles I have put together (probably just edges out the D&RGW Colorado Map image form Liberty Puzzles). The multiple bands of colors combined with the free form pieces made for quite the challenge. I didn't even bother trying to pull edge pieces out, as is the case with most wood puzzles the designers go to a lot of effort to hide the edges and the corners. If you are looking for a challenge for your next puzzle this is a great one!

The colors are a bit off but they are pretty close.

Cartoon Wednesday

 

Cartoon Wednesday

 

Warehouse Row - Building #1 - Mounting windows and Doors

This is step that has been a long time in coming and I'm reasonably pleased with the result. Before I started mounting the windows and doors I took a hard look at the sills and lintels. I think the original pieces were to thick and some where decidedly less than "square". I opted to try and reduce the width of each to 3 "bricks". Of course cutting caused some issues with the paper and there were a number of tears, mostly shallow but in one instance I ripped out almost the whole section between the 2nd & 3rd floor windows. I was able to take some of the leftover paper and cover these offending sections up and you really can't see the patches. It was certainly tedious and I'm facing the same situation on the street side wall.

I used super glue to mount everything in place and putty (vallejo in this case, because I had it) to fill the gaps from the backside. I need to find something to impress some detail into the sills and lintels, still scouting through my parts box for something at this point. That is the nice thing about this particular PVC sheets it takes impressions really well.

At this point I had finished trimming all of the lintels and sills to be a bit narrower (3 bricks or about 9"). While most of the ripped paper is pretty small, you can see the large tear on the right side between the 2nd and 3rd story.

At this point I have finished the "patches". I simply took some of the left over brick paper and either replaced the entire area or just cut single strips of bricks and glued everything in place. I'm pretty sure that it will pass muster at this point as its hard to pick out the patches even when you are looking for them.

At this point, I have shortened up all the lintels and sills a bit, they just looked to wide before.

Just another view of the mostly completed wall. The only other thing I could add at this point is the decorative band between the first and second floors. Everything else will have to wait for final assembly.

Cartoon Wednesday