Laser Cut Jigsaw Puzzle

So I decided to make a jigsaw puzzle of my daughter’s dog as a Christmas Present, and to cut it out with my Creality Falcon 2 lasercutter.

Click images below for larger views

The original photo

Cropped and masked in Adobe Photoshop

As the puzzle was to be shaped like the dog, an outline path was created in Photoshop from the mask, and offset a bit to create a white border for the finished job. The path was exported as an Adobe Illustrator .ai file. for further work in Illustrator.

Before more work in Illustrator could be undertaken, it was necessary to create the actual jigsaw cutting template. Therefore, the Photoshop outline path which had been sent to Illustrator, was in-turn exported from Illustrator as a .svg file, which was then imported into an online Jigsaw Puzzle Generator to create the irregular outline shape cutting template, including the individual puzzle pieces. Did you get all that?!!

The resulting shapes were downloaded as another .svg file, suitable for importing to Illustrator. In Illustrator, the jigsaw cutting template was combined with the cropped photo and a pair of registration marks were added.

An Illustrator .ai file was saved for use in the laser cutting program Lightburn. That file only had the puzzle template (created in the online puzzle generator) and the pair of registration marks.

A colour laser print of the masked photo and registrastion marks (without the puzzle template) was glued to 3mm thick plywood with spray adhesive (which won’t crinkle the paper)

The Adobe Illustrator cutting template with registration marks, was loaded into Lightburn. The cutting template was set for the laser to cut through the plywood. The registration marks were set to non-cutting mode. They were used as alignment targets in the laser cutter to make sure that when the plywood with the mounted photo was cut, that the cuts and photo were aligned properly.

The Creality Falcon 2 lasercutter and Lightburn. Barely visible in this photo is the Lightburn screen with an image from the lasercutter’s overhead camera. The camera is supposed to be for alignment purposes, but due to distortion, it’s not accurate enough for fine work, hence the need to use registration marks. The two blue circles on Lightburn’s screen show the on-screen registration marks being aligned with the printed marks in the machine.

An procedure called ‘Print and Cut’ in Lightburn is used to align the on-screen registration marks with the printed marks on the work piece, then the final puzzle is ready to cut out.

Something went wrong on the first attempt – the alignment was out of registration, requiring another photo to be printed and mounted on a fresh piece of plywood. In the photo below, the top left cut registration mark (which I forgot to set to non-cutting!) is not aligned with the printed mark on the plywood.

After resetting the registration alignment, the second cut worked perfectly.

A coat of varnish was applied…

…and the puzzle was finished!