The Framers Forum

Sunday morning the sun is shining, and there I am at 8am, the earliest ive been at work all year, to get ahead to have tomorrow off.

Why dont I get home till half past ten at night?

Because some loon has put a customers job, which only happens to be an assembled 1000 piece jigsaw, on a top shelf 7ft up in the air, on top of a pile of boxes, on a sheet of cardboard, and the whole damned thing has fell on me when I went to get the bin bags down.....

So, Tom, you have won the "Daftest place in the history of mankind to store a jigsaw puzzle waiting to be framed, and your prize is to find the last two pieces which I think fell in the morso chippings box...... Ive spent all night putting the rest of it back together. Good luck, the missing two pieces are parts of a beach, which happens to camoflage them wonderfully against wood chippings.....

It is just a league above the last one - when the electric drill fell over and went through that oil painting (which came back from the restorers last week) - Maybe its time to actually FIT those tool balancers we ordered from lion

We all have "brain donor" moments, but I think the jigsaw incident takes the biscuit for 2007 - fingers crossed.

I will laugh about it one day..... but not this week

Feel your pain Kev - similar thing happened here but it took me 3 months to piece the puzzle together again

That was good going though - it said "3-5 years" on the box apparently

Mmmmmmmmmmmmm..............methinks I will mount jigsaws the day they come in from now on!

kev@frames wrote:... the missing two pieces are parts of a beach, which happens to camoflage them wonderfully against wood chippings.....

You couldn't script it! Nightmare, Kev!

We usually try and do them as soon as they come in, Ive just been reminded why :-/

Last Spring, an off duty firefighter came in with one of those sentimental, sappy jigsaw puzzles of a Norman Rockwell little boy ogling over a fire truck.

This guy was a typical, rugged outdoor type who, to demonstrate his “macho”, drove a pick up truck. But, the truck bed was uncovered, so he felt the puzzle would have become dirty or damaged if tried to transport it there.

Instead, his great idea was to roll up the puzzle loosely in a towel and carry it in the passenger seat of the cab. Needless to say when he presented it at our design counter, his completed puzzle fell apart. Brilliant plan, fella!

Rather than risk going home with it (and, maybe, getting so discouraged that he wouldn’t return with it), I gave him a sheet of foam board and plunked him in a chair. He spent nearly two hours in the corner of our shop reconstructing the piece(s), but, at least I didn’t lose the sale.

Mow•ron!

He had the right idea, just didn't execute it too well.

Believe it or not, you can roll up a jigsaw puzzle.

See here.

i thought i might add in some valuable information that experience has handed down to my mother..

When she was first starting out - about 16 years ago - when i was but a young thing- she got passed a foil jigsaw to drymount.

She'd framed numerous jigsaws in the past for me and my brother, using heat activated Drymount board and her hot press. This time however, good luck was not on her side,

Using the hot press debonded all the foil from the top of the jigsaw... a costly and time consuming mistake.. if i remember correctly she had to buy a new jigsaw and complete it.

Grahame Case wrote:Using the hot press debonded all the foil from the top of the jigsaw... a costly and time consuming mistake.

I learned that lesson the hard way, too, Grahame. With my blunder, it was a picture. All I could do was scan it and repair it in Photopaint as best I could. Took forever....

update on ours is that there is still one piece missing, and we have ordered a new puzzle from the distributors to replace the one piece.

gah....

Grahame Case wrote: Using the hot press debonded all the foil from the top of the jigsaw... a costly and time consuming mistake.. if i remember correctly she had to buy a new jigsaw and complete it.

The "What if" factor strikes again.

"update on ours is that there is still one piece missing, and we have ordered a new puzzle from the distributors to replace the one piece.

gah...."

Kev, once you FIND that piece in the new puzzle assortment (and before you finish the clients puzzle), scan it and print / glue the copy onto some suitable board to make a new piece.

Then you can assemble the new one with all the pieces, frame it, and sell it !!
You should be really quick at assembling that one second time round ;D

Cling wrap pulled taught over the puzzle and taped to the underside of the board keeps the damn things in place until you get to doing the job. In fact I even let them stand upright like that to keep them out of the way. I once had a guy come in with a black refuse bag which was proudly dumped on my table with the words "frame this please" Inside - a huge 1.5 m puzzle of Neuschwanstein which he had rolled like a carpet. Un rolled we only had to put a few pieces back in position. The absolute pits though is the customer (and I have had more than a couple) who has lost a piece but still wants it framed. Then yours truely hauls out the old tin with acrylics from the forgotten years and I get down to my first love (painting) and paint a piece which most of the recipients cannot even find once the whole job is complete. Hell of a waste of time though even if charging more.

realhotglass wrote:"update on ours is that there is still one piece missing, and we have ordered a new puzzle from the distributors to replace the one piece.

gah...."

Kev, once you FIND that piece in the new puzzle assortment (and before you finish the clients puzzle), scan it and print / glue the copy onto some suitable board to make a new piece.

Then you can assemble the new one with all the pieces, frame it, and sell it !!
You should be really quick at assembling that one second time round ;D

you are a very bad man ..... very very bad indeed

Yes, it was a rather evil thought

Actually, I'm amazed you managed to find one of the missing pieces in the Morso chip box.

I also think Tom should be given the pleasure of assembling the new puzzle !!
After all he can only expect to learn from his mistakes this way

realhotglass wrote:Yes, it was a rather evil thought

Actually, I'm amazed you managed to find one of the missing pieces in the Morso chip box.

I also think Tom should be given the pleasure of assembling the new puzzle !!
After all he can only expect to learn from his mistakes this way

Sods law says the AWOL piece will materialise about fifteen seconds after the postman delivers the new puzzle

he's put it back together awaiting the piecxe.

Interestingly one of our customers told us that many puzzle companies will replace free of charge one or two missing pieces if you tell them which part of the board they are from, not this company, obviously (ah, there is sods law again....)

Grahame Case wrote:i thought i might add in some valuable information that experience has handed down to my mother..

When she was first starting out - about 16 years ago - when i was but a young thing- she got passed a foil jigsaw to drymount.

She'd framed numerous jigsaws in the past for me and my brother, using heat activated Drymount board and her hot press. This time however, good luck was not on her side,

Using the hot press debonded all the foil from the top of the jigsaw... a costly and time consuming mistake.. if i remember correctly she had to buy a new jigsaw and complete it.

Just spotted this post while looking for high viewed posts (See Members only - Most viewed posted by Robo) . Grahame didn't get this quite right. I didn't buy a new jigsaw - I spent hours that night sticking every bit of foil back on to the jigsaw. The customer was none the wiser, but I had nightmares about that jigsaw for weeks after.