In awesome news - the first paid puzzles are in production and ready to ship out. First sale took about an hour of publishing the site - woah!
With the puzzles having a thick chipboard backer, it likes to crisp up a bit on the cuts. I’ve used baking soda and it cleans them well but leaves a bit of residue. In an effort to make a cleaner product, I dumped my pieces into a piece of Tupperware with some fine grained sea salt; closed it up and tumbled it around for a couple of minutes. Every nook and cranny is clean and no salt hanging to the pieces. Plus, it can be reused several times. I just dump the pieces into a strainer over another container and recapture the salt.
Here is the salt (with a bit of fresh salt poured in to show the difference)
Oh man, you may have just saved me hours and hours of work if this is effective on my materials and would open up so many more intricate possibilities!
No idea. Probably not. That’s just what I had handy. Regular ol table salt would probably work as well - the stuff I used was fine grain, which I think would work better than coarse.
Agree on the finer grain. I have used salt to clean the white coating off the inside of light bulbs – regular table salt worked better than coarse kosher salt. Better surface contact.
It has a LONG ways to go and I’m notorious for launching something before I should… but, it’ll get there someday. So much for one person to do everything.
So anxious to make puzzles for my grandson. Any chance you’ll share your technique for success. Chipboard, photo adhesive, and type of photo prints? Thinking you have an ultra nice printer … But hoping having a matte photo print will work.
That seems like WAY more work than necessary for something that’s so cheap to buy in bulk. Especially to reconstitute a reasonably fine grain. What would be your motivation for doing so?
Fair enough. Maybe you can find some other use for the used salt (live somewhere with snow/ice, you could use it on walkways maybe)? If nothing else, at least it’s not a polymer product that’s going to take up space in a landfill for eons.