Breaking up is hard to do

March 10, 2018 4:01 PM

Sorry, this is not a question of the heart. While laboriously taking apart a jigsaw puzzle, it occurred to me, how do the commercial companies avoid this tedium? Is there an easier way?

MY understanding is that, once a jigsaw puzzle is stamped, it goes to a machine called a "breaker", where some process separates the puzzle into a thousand pieces and puts it into a bag. My question is, how does this breaker work? Anyone who tries shaking a puzzle apart knows that simple shaking is not going to produce the 99% separation that you get when you open a puzzle bag. (I leave out this method's potential for losing pieces under the sofa). Are they using super high frequency? Is a little old fashioned banging required? Whatever it is, can it be adapted to home use to get, say, an 85% separation? Your superior insights are appreciated.

posted by alonsoquijano to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (4 answers total)

I have no idea about the industry angle, but I've never found it that hard to do. It does depend on the quality of the puzzle - my cheap $2 puzzles come apart incredibly easily, sometimes even while I'm completing them. But with the better ones, I tend to lift and fold them into a few big pieces, put them in a plastic bag, add any leftover bits and then sort of gently massage the bag to separate the pieces. Then the bag goes in the box as extra insurance against losing pieces. This won't achieve 100% separation, but 90-95% is good enough for me.
posted by Athanassiel at 4:15 PM on March 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Check out 3:40 in this video.
posted by suedehead at 4:33 PM on March 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

Best answer: It's only on screen for a split second, but you can see it at :50 here.
posted by O9scar at 4:37 PM on March 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you for the videos: where you start with Google determines where you finish, and I would never have found these. I had hoped for a simple principle which I could scale down to a low-tech solution, albeit with a corresponding sacrifice in time or precision; but these are serious machines that don't appear to offer an easy way down. The existing manual methods of taking a puzzle apart offend me because of their lack of speed and elegance, but it seems I will have to persevere...
posted by alonsoquijano at 6:13 PM on March 11, 2018