New Puzzle Day Part II: How to NOT ship a puzzle

Wedding Feast shipped in
paper and totally fucked up...

With a gapping split, how confident
would you be the pieces were not
all over from here to Germany?

Another fantastic example of how NOT
to ship a puzzle.

Pieces rattling around the bottom of a
busted up open box... not  good sign.

Box wide open in the packing box...
At the very least, seal the box
with tape, better yet, put the pieces in
ziplock bags and seal the box!

So, today is a bittersweet. Three new puzzles showed up including the long awaited Wedding Feast at Cana, yet two out of the three showed up totally fucked up! Wedding feast was shipped in just the puzzle box wrapped in shipping paper all the way from Germany! When I picked it up at the post office, it was split at the seam and most likely had leaked pieces from here to Germany! This is seriously frustrating to wait over a month for a puzzle to find it in this condition.

The other new puzzle, the 6000pc Clementoni Magna Carta (Art. 36504) arrived in a crushed overpacked box (a box twice as large as it should have been) with the puzzle and loose pieces rattling around inside it. Overpacking a box is a good thing, but it needs to be secure inside the box. Not taping the puzzle box shut or placing the pieces in a sealed bag is another faux pas. It should be plainly obvious that you can't just ship these things like that but apparently not.

I really hope the remaining big boys on their way were packed with considerably more care. For now, I am debating on counting 15,000 pieces or just accepting that they are most likely missing pieces. I'm damned if I do and damned if I dont. It will take 16 hours to count all of them, but then again, if you are missing more than a few pieces, who would want to spend the dozens of hours required to build it?

I suppose people have a common misconception that the USPS cares about your package. They do not. I don't know what they do  to these boxes, but it is far from handling them with care! I know I will be explicit in all future puzzle purchases about how to package it correctly! 99% percent of the problems could be solved by sealing the pieces in some sort of bag. There is a reason they come from the manufacturer that way!

Enough bitching... All in all, this really sucks. It's a lesson to me that I need to communicate to people how to properly ship a puzzle here and if there are missing pieces (it is assumed there are) I will just perfect my technique of making my own pieces.

Wedding Feast at Cana

Paolo Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana - 9000pc from Ravensburger is the puzzle that started it all for me. I have written about it a bunch here. I finished the majority of this puzzle maybe 10 years ago and it was destroyed in a move. So I am very much looking forward to getting it done finally.

The puzzle itself is of the same era as Tower of Babel and is printed on Ravi's green board (versus the blue board of today) and has shape features of that era as well (Limited knob diversity and location) but is well printed on fine linen paper with great color. A fine reproduction of the original art!

Magna Carta

There was so much to say about this puzzle, I moved it to its own  its own page here.

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Here are some pics from todays haul. Enjoy!

At last, I have her back. She may be damaged, but I will get
her fixed up one way or another. The largest format
of Paolo Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana.

Clementoni's Magna Carta has magnificant
coloring and the pieces appear to have
great dichotomy of knob curvature. I love
the blue cardboard. These pieces feel great!

Here are the pieces of Wedding Feast at Cana. As you can see, high quality on Ravi's old
style board. In the background is the claim form I suspect I will need to use!