Thoughts on the new big boys

 I have been thinking about this, I think the New York Skyline will be more fun to build. It is a  special challenge to offer a massive format puzzle that is both aesthetically appealing in its completed state and great puzzle to construct.

Take most massive paintings, it would be extremely boring as a 35K puzzle! I think this is why people prefer Educa's Life and Wildlife to Ravensburgers Double Retrospect. After looking carefully at new york. I think it will be great to assemble because of all the detail. Other new york puzzles (Ravensburger 12,0000 with the dumb saturn in the sky) are not realistic or monotonous whereas the new one is neither.

What do you guys think?

Ravensburgers new 32,000pc offering. Fantastic overall image and great detail at the piece level. Considering Ravensburgers awesome fit and finish, this puzzle will be a pleasure to assemble! Probably my most anticipated puzzle.

Educa's new 33,600pc Wildlife. I think on the piece level, it will be great to assemble but the overall image is not to my taste. Seems everyone is this animal illustration kick. 

12,000pcs - This is gonna suck. Monotonous and at the end of the day, its completely unrealistic.

Life - Section A Complete / Wedding Beast: Day 3

Hi! We finished the firs section of Life!!!

Last night M finished up the first section of Life while I continued to sort the Wedding Beast. She did such a great job! I think she did about 700 pieces in one sitting! This wasn't enough for her either, she started on the 1000 piece Color Palette puzzle just as soon as she was done.

While we were moving life onto a board to clear the puzzle table, we had a lot of trouble. It was a two person job for sure and plenty of pieces came off and had to be reassembled. Life, as it turns out, is real lose, a bit of a whore if you will So, be careful with her, she is lose, you can't just toss her around like a tight little Springbok.

Oh yeah, at first we thought we were missing three pieces, ok we were missing three pieces. We found one in the sofa, and the other two we tracked down were inside the main box in the plastic bag the pieces came in. Turns out they never made it out of the bag!

Anyhow, all pieces were accounted for and now we have to figure out what the heck to do with it. Right now we are most likely going to mount it to foam and put underneath the puzzle table so you can see it when the table is raised.

M is powering through the last section of Life today!

25 days to complete the first 6,000 pieces!

The first two pieces of Wedding Feast...
9,118 to go!

Color Palette - 1000pc, Master Pieces
Available from Amazon.com
Started: 7/15/2013 (View Posts)

M cant get enough today, she started on Color Palette...

Life: Day 21

I thought I would show a video of our puzzle table after 21 days of life. We are almost done with the first section. Hopefully I can finish it up tonight! Last night I didn't do much. I ended up playing backgammon with a friend and losing something like 10 straight games. He is really good and I thought I knew how to play! I love being schooled!

Life: Day 20

Last night I ended up working until nearly 1am and only puzzled for two hours so I did not get a lot done. I started on the camel and ended up getting in around 250 pieces including the camel, donkey, back half of the horse, goat and most of the middle giraffe.

It was really fun puzzling, and this section is wrapping up nicely! Life is a really great puzzle. It is not hard but offers a good challenge and you don't get bored with it because there is so many different things to do. Its immense size means you don't see all of the detail until you assemble the puzzle and there are plenty of surprises on pieces. It's difficulty comes in the shear volume of pieces to assemble so that also keeps it interesting for the serious puzzler.

It was interesting to take a before and after photo because I had a time stamp on the two events. I can see that I managed to place a little over two pieces a minute. It seems my puzzling rate for large puzzles format puzzles seems to be around 100 pieces an hour. At that rate it will take about 10,000 hours to assemble the big boy list. According to the 10,000-hour-rule that should make us experts!

It's time to start building some animals. I like to disconnect the section I am working on and place it on board so I can build the puzzle in the correct orientation and not have to be contorted while putting it together!

.... 2 hours later. Time for bed. 

Let There Be Light

After a few days with the puzzle table, I realized something had to be done about the lighting situation. I thought about this for a while and realized a task light was the right choice! We would some lights from Office max for $18 each that fit the bill perfectly! They clamp on and can be moved and removed easily (as to be stored with the table and position where needed). The move about etc and the price was right.

Without hesitating, I went over to picked them up! We know have great lighting, the only thing i would do different is add two more! I might also put some blocks of hard wood in the table and drill holes for the lamp so that we dont have to mess with clamps and just slide the light where we want it. 

Last night we tackled Life for a long time. I had hoped to finish it last night, but Life threw up some resistance to being assembled! The last section of sky did not go much faster. For some reason, it was really hard. M struggled with the Zebras for some time too. She finally got them completed and picked off the 

Today, I am going to tackle it again. I am going to take the long hanging fruit of the giraffes and camel and then I will look carefully at what is left and make a decision then.

Our upgraded puzzle table with dual lighting!

19 Days of Life

Life: Day 18

Today I managed to knock out the surface water and most of the animals in it along with the 70% of the sky. (Guessing it was about 1000 pieces). We still may be able to finish section 1 tomorrow but we will have to really work hard at it. The rest of the sky should be pretty easy. When you work on a large section, the last third is way faster!

Off to bed for me.

-Thomas

Starting on the surface water. 

Surface water complete. This is SOOO much easier than the clownfish.

Most of the sky is now done. 

Life: Day 17

Well its been two weeks and change already. I had hoped we would be done with the first section by now but we have been busy with work and birthdays and puzzle tables and blogs and facebook integrations etc etc etc... Yeah Yeah excuses...

Last night I finished up the lower third of the puzzle (everything below the waterline). Today I will tackle the water above the water line and then the sky. M is off work tomorrow and we should be able to finish all the animals together tomorrow night. This is the plan anyway! Wish us  luck!

Oh I found some more Big Boys today from Schmidt. One of them appears to be a recent offering while the other two are circa 80s.  Check 'em out! I really want the tall ship. I will see if I can talk  M into it. M told me I have to "slow my roll" on buying the big boys (It is rather expensive to collect all of them)

Underwater section complete for now (A few pieces are still mis sorted in other areas) It always more efficient to move on and tackle large sections then come back to these stragglers

Glacier - 6000pc, Schmidt
I think this puzzle is awesome. It would be a real challenge to say the least!

Anne Geddes: A Composition in Blue and Yellow - 6000pc, Schmidt
I think this now qualifies as the very last puzzle I ever want to assemble! I would rather go insane with Schmidt's 6000 piece monster What a Crowd than this...

Windjammer Voilier Goletta a Vele Quadre Zallschip the Tall Ship Fullriggare (aka Tall Ship) - 6000pc, Schmidt
This is amazing!

Life Update July 1st 2013

Tonight M and I worked on Life for a bit. M is still wrapping up the hot air balloons and I am busy filling in the water. I was able to get the remaining fish and some of the large coral heads together. It sure is nice to work on the puzzle now that I am done with the clown fish. The puzzle is a great way to spend easy time relaxing after a long day of work!

I still find it funny how I can remember pieces of this puzzle from August of 2009 (almost 4 years ago). I love seeing a piece I remember. Tonight M asked me about a piece she could not place and one look and I knew it was the giraffes neck where  he comes close the camel. For whatever reason, that piece has stuck in my head from the last time I worked on Life.

Here are the update pictures:

I managed to get the rest of the fish together and most of the larger coral heads tonight

M made great progress on the balloons.

Done Fishing

Tonight I finished up the the clownfish. I made it really hard on myself by not doing a better sort. As you can see by the image, almost every fish is missing pieces which made it 10 times harder to do.

In general, spend extra time sorting! It is probably the number one thing you can do to make a puzzles more enjoyable!

Goodnight!

Clowning around with Life continues

I am working at a decidedly slow pace on this... but never the less, the clownfish are starting to take form. I just need to finish the blue fish (tonight) and I will be "done" working on the fish and moving on to filling in the water.

These fish just dont seem to want to put themselves together. It's starting to look really great!

In other news, our puzzle closet just isn't working anymore, so I decided to stack up the puzzles against the wall. If I run out of wall, then I know its time to stop buying puzzles!

Clowning around

Wtf is taking me so long to get the clownfish done... Still not done

I think it comes down to the sort, I know pieces are in the very large animal section and I am not digging into it yet.

100th POST: 6 months of puzzling and a bit of life

This is our 100th post! We have been officially puzzling together for 6 months! Last night we spent a few hours on Life and made a dent in the fish and the ballons. The puzzle is really easy in some areas, but the fish make things interesting. There is a steady progression of color from green, yellow-green, yellow, orange and then red that makes sorting the fish a bit difficult. Also, we surely missed a few pieces while sorting so its a bit frustrating to complete this section. I was hoping to be done by now but we got side tracked with our photo puzzle and being a bit under the weather.

Anyway, in 6 months, we have managed to assemble 21 puzzles and two sections of really big boys for a total of 27,000 pieces. Thats 151 pieces a day or so. At this rate, with over a million pieces in the big boy list, it will take us 18 years to assemble them all... (gulp) Good thing we have the rest of our life together!

We need to get BUSY!

The first fish coming together

M said f the clownfish and started working on the ballons

The pieces are beautiful

Fighting the orange/yellow. I need to take my own advice and start working on the other colors! Just keep puzzling!

Flipping

So, I did not get far on Life last night, I only managed to get the clown pieces flipped over and the edge assembled. I didn't feel that great and I was tired from the Krypt marathon the night before. The new boards are great however! It feels great to snap the pieces down and hear that click! They also offer just a bit more grip so the pieces stay in place (but can still slide if you want them to). I HIGHLY recommend these versus foam board or cardboard!

This is my second attempt at assembling Life, (I started it 4 years ago and managed to not get far, I was busy with my new born son at the time); this being said, I am WAY better at puzzling now then I was then and Life is so easy compared to the puzzles we have been working on!


Remember Dory from finding nemo and her line, "Just keep swimming". We joke all the time when you cant find a piece, "Just keep puzzling". Move on, dont get hung up hunting for one piece! It's such a waste of time most of the time! You will find it eventually. They key to these big boys is parallel processing! If you can get multiple sections going at a time, you will find more pieces as you are searching.

Oh we also picked up a new patio set today, check out how we got it home!

- Cheers

Tom and Mercedes

Not a lot of progres last night, but the new boards are awesome! I highly recommend them!

I kind of want to set up the table on the top of the Jeep and drive around...

The Beginning of Life

On the first day, God created stuff, and by the end of the week, there was a ton of things on this planet and this puzzle pretty much has all of it! One of the great things about having a puzzle closet overflowing with puzzles is not knowing which puzzle to do next. We tossed around a bunch of ideas tonight and decided to rip into Life! We are starting with section 1 and are sorting into clown fish, ballons, surface water, underwater, animals sky and edge pieces.

Tomorrow I am going to home depot to get some thin sheets of plywood to use as assembly boards so that each slice of life can be broken into three sections and stored under the sofa (until I get the puzzle table built). We have been using cardboard for this but its just not big enough. Each slice of life is roughly 62in x 42in. Our cardboard is 44in by 20in, so it will be 2 inches short in the end.

M starts working midnights tomorrow (not happy about this) so we are trying to get on a new schedule of staying up late. The only good thing about it is I will have a lot of time to puzzle at night!

M opening life!

Wowza, thats a lot of pieces to sort tonight!

Why did I pick this again...

So many pretty colors!

The first two pieces! When someone asks, "Who do you do those large puzzles?" The answer is , "One piece at a time"

I had an accident with the clippers today which resulted in shaving my head.... DUMB idea! What a sunburn :-)

LIFE ARRIVES!

24,000 pieces of pure awesomeness just showed up today! We are gonna hold of a bit before jumping into this one, we just finished Rizzi and soon to be a section of 4 Historical Maps, time to do some small ones. The big ones are a ton of effort.

Early Bday Present

Today we won LIFE from ebay as an early bday present! I cant wait to build this one, it will be so fun!

Life, The Greatest Puzzle - 24000pc, EDUCA

You can do it to! Buy it from Amazon.com

Props to some OG Puzzlers

Seems the Slater family is one serious puzzling family! Thanks for the tips on glueing and tracing like sections!

They were the first to assemble the 24,000 piece life puzzle, and have assembled more large format puzzles than anyone surely has. They have some great information and techniques on their sites:

This is all about how they assembled LIFE: http://www.aegroup.com/puzzle/


I have talked about how Double Retrospect repeats and I use a previously assembled section to complete the next, well this technique is going to save me a LOT of time!

Great technique from Scott Slater on how to use another section to help complete a new section. Large puzzles have repeating sections of the puzzle. In double retrospect, there are only roughly 1000 unique pieces, they are repeated and rotated in each image.

Here is there video on mounting a large puzzle