A New Twist to Puzzle Making and Puzzle Solving Puzzle maker Charlie Ross personalizes puzzle making by sharing with you, different methods to add your own creative touch to this popular scroll saw woodworking project. From learning to convert a favorite digital photo, art print or other image onto a wooden jigsaw puzzle, to mastering his three puzzle making methods of strip cutting, stair step cutting, and freeform cutting, you, whether a beginner or experienced, can move at your own pace in practicing each technique. Ross also includes designs for brain busting puzzles with imbedded hidden objects, no corners, and other clever techniques. Includes tricks and tips for scroll saw woodworkers to make personalized and challenging puzzles from photos and digital images. Since Evan Kern's Making Wooden Jigsaw Puzzles went out of print more than a decade ago, aspiring puzzle makers have had no book to teach them the ropes. Charles W. Ross has stepped in to fill that void with a new volume by the same title. Ross is a second generation puzzle cutter. During the Great Depression his father, Charles W. Ross 3rd (1903-1989), wanted to supplement his income as the manager of the family corn canning factory in Frederick, Maryland. He built his own wooden jigsaw mechanism and mounted it on the treadle base from a Singer sewing machine. He pasted calendar pictures to plywood, cut them up in his basement workshop, put them in bright orange cardboard boxes, typed the labels, and rented the finished products out for 25 cents per week. Everyone in the Ross family enjoyed assembling jigsaws. Some fifty years later Charlie Ross, the son, and also a woodworker, began making his own jigsaw puzzles as gifts for family and friends. Now, having retired from a career in occupational safety, he is sharing with the public what he has learned about puzzle making. This 103-page handbook is clearly written, accessible even to middle schoolers in shop classes, and generously illustrated with Ross's own professional photographs. It covers the basics of materials and tool selection, glueing a picture to a board, cutting, and packaging the finished puzzle. Ross concentrates on simple strip cutting, and offers step-bystep instructions for five practice puzzles. The first three are plain wood with grid lines drawn on them to develop skill at cutting large, medium and small pieces. The fourth and fifth practice puzzles use pictures, require strip cutting without any guidelines for the patlem, and include a few figure pieces. Finally he takes the reader through a 400-piece puzzle project that incorporates the lessons leamed in the five practice ones. He briefly mentions some cutting tricks-split comers, disguised edges, fake edges, irregular edges, drop-outs, and color line cutting and illustrates a few of these. Two appendices present a short history of wooden jigsaw puzzles and ten pages of patterns (strip cut grids in three sizes, letters, numbers, and thirty figure pieces). An index makes it easy to find topics. As woodworking projects go, there's nothing more fun than a puzzle. Now, with the help of Making Wooden Jigsaw Puzzles and the creative mind of puzzle maker Charlie Ross, you can have fun creating special jigsaw puzzles using your favorite photos. From learning to convert a favorite digital photo, art print or other image onto a wooden jigsaw puzzle, to mastering his three puzzle-making methods of strip cutting, stair-step cutting, and free form cutting, you can move at your own pace in practicing each technique. Ross also includes ingenious designs for brain-busting puzzles with imbedded hidden objects, no corners, and other clever techniques. Making a personalized puzzle for your next project will keep your family and friends entertained for hours, while at the same time create an heirloom for generations to come. Charlie Ross is a second-generation puzzle maker who is currently retired from a career in Occupational Safety-a subject which is the author of one book and many articles which have been published in professional journals.