How Are Wooden Puzzles Made? A Look Inside the Workshop

By Simon I., Founder of Opus Puzzles. Published June 7, 2026.

The question I get most at markets, after someone has turned a piece over twice in their fingers and gone quiet, is some flavour of "how on earth is this made?" They want a one-line answer. There isn't one, so a while ago I started telling the long version instead, and people stay for it, which surprised me. This is that long version. How a flat sheet of wood and a picture end up as the thing tipped out on your table.

I'll start with the bit I got wrong, because it sets up everything else. When I began I was certain you cut the wood first and printed onto the finished pieces after. Seemed obvious. It is exactly backwards, and I know that because my first proper batch came out a smeared, misaligned mess that I could not sell to anyone. You print first, onto a whole bonded panel, and you cut dead last. Once I had that the right way round, the rest of it slowly started to work.

What is a wooden puzzle actually made of?

Three things, when you boil it down. A thin plywood panel, a picture bonded to its face, and a great deal of careful cutting. The panel is the part nobody asks about and the part I think about most.

We use basswood plywood, roughly 4mm thick. Basswood is a pale, soft hardwood that woodcarvers have leaned on for over a hundred years, and they leaned on it for the same reasons I do. It's light, the grain is fine and even, and it stays where you put it. The Wood Database describes it as soft, light, straight-grained, fine and even in texture, easy to work. In plain terms it means the stuff cuts clean and doesn't fight the beam. A harder, coarser wood chars and splinters along every edge. I tried a few early on. Basswood takes a laser the way warm butter takes a knife, and once you have felt the difference you stop arguing with it.

Plywood, not solid wood, and that's on purpose too. Solid timber moves with the weather. It cups and twists as the air dries out and dampens up across the year, and a panel that has twisted even slightly will not lie flat or click together properly. Plywood is built from thin layers glued with their grain crossed over, which reduces that movement a lot. Same reason the backs of good cabinets and the bottoms of decent drawers are ply. I want a panel that's the same shape in January as it is in July, sitting on a kitchen table near a radiator.

How is the picture put onto the wood?

Printed straight onto the panel, before a single piece exists. And this is the bit I guessed wrong for months. It isn't ordinary ink. We use UV-cured ink.

Normal ink dries by soaking in or drying off, and on bare wood that gives you a soft, muddy picture that bleeds into the grain. That was my smeared first batch, more or less. UV-cured ink doesn't dry at all, it sets. Moments after it lands, a UV lamp passes over it and the ink hardens on the surface very fast, locked there as a thin tough film instead of a stain. That's the reason the colours on a finished puzzle sit up bright and sharp rather than sinking away. The picture is sat on the surface of the wood, bonded to it, not drunk down into it. The day that finally clicked for me, the rejects stopped.

Only once the panel is printed and cured does it go anywhere near the laser. Print, cure, then cut. I say it to myself in that order every time, because the one time you don't is the time you ruin a sheet.

How are the puzzle pieces cut?

By a laser, following a file we draw by hand. The laser itself is a tightly focused beam of light, hot enough to vaporise a clean line straight through 4mm of basswood in a single pass. It traces the file exactly, every interlocking edge, every shaped piece, and it leaves a kerf barely wider than a hair. It is genuinely satisfying to watch, the first hundred times anyway.

That faint brown line around every piece is scorch. A whisper of burn left where the beam went by, the honest signature of a laser cut. I get emails, real ones, asking how to clean it off. You can't, and honestly you would not want to. It's the wood remembering how it was shaped. I tell people that and most of them come round to liking it.

The laser is fast, tireless, and completely without taste. It will cut anything you hand it, beautifully, and care not at all. Which is exactly why the next part is done by a person.

Who decides where the whimsy pieces go?

A person does. This is the slow, human heart of the whole thing, and it's the answer that stops people mid-sentence at the market.

The whimsy pieces, those shapes cut as a fox, a leaf, a star, a tiny bird tucked into the design, are not invented by the machine. The laser cuts the file. A human draws the file. Someone sits with each artwork and decides, right here in the corner of this forest, a fox should hide. There, up in the sky, scatter a few stars. You place each one by eye, fitting the shape to the picture so it feels found rather than dropped in. A full design might hold forty or fifty of them, and every single one was a small decision somebody made on purpose. There's a particular fox I draw into a lot of the woodland designs, and I have lost count of the customers who email to say it was the first piece they went hunting for. I wrote more about where the tradition comes from in what whimsy pieces are.

This is the bit a factory drops to save money, and it's precisely the bit that makes the puzzle worth building. A grid of identical pieces is a manufacturing job. A puzzle where someone hid a fox in the leaves for you to find later is closer to a letter than a product. That sounds soppy until you have watched someone find the fox.

What happens after the pieces are cut?

The unglamorous, essential part. Finishing and checking, and it takes longer than people imagine. The cut panel comes off the bed still holding every piece in place, like a finished puzzle that has never once been apart. Someone presses it out gently, piece by piece, partly to free them and partly to feel that each one lifts clean and clicks back without fuss.

A soft brush clears the fine dust the cutting leaves behind. Every piece gets a quick eye, looking for any that didn't separate fully or that sat over a knot in the ply and went stubborn. Then the whole thing is counted, twice if I'm honest, and boxed flat in its recyclable gift box. And that's a wooden puzzle. Ready to be tipped straight back out on somebody's table and built from nothing all over again.

Why does any of this make the puzzle better?

Because nearly every step that costs me time is one you feel later, at your own table, without ever being told about it. The basswood ply is why it lies flat and clicks true. The UV print is why the colours sit bright on the surface instead of soaking into the grain like they did in my first sorry batch. The hand-placed whimsies are why the build has small surprises waiting in it. None of it announces itself. It just quietly adds up to something that feels considered, which is more or less the only reason to make a thing out of wood instead of stamping it out of card. If you want the straight head-to-head, I laid it out in wooden puzzles versus cardboard jigsaws.

So next time you turn one of these over in your fingers at a market and go quiet, you'll know what you're holding. A printed, cured, laser-cut basswood panel that a person sat with long enough to hide a fox in. You can see where all of it ends up across the whole range.

Frequently asked questions

Are wooden puzzles laser cut or die cut?

Ours are laser cut. A focused beam traces each piece, which is how we get the fine, shaped whimsy pieces, the little foxes and stars, that a steel die struggles to match. Most cardboard jigsaws are die cut, stamped out by a metal cutting form. That's faster and cheaper, and it mostly sticks to ordinary interlocking shapes.

What wood are wooden puzzles made from?

Ours are basswood plywood, about 4mm thick. Basswood is light, fine-grained and stable, so it cuts cleanly and stays flat. It's plywood rather than solid wood because the cross-glued layers help resist warping as the humidity in your house shifts through the year.

Why are the edges of wooden puzzle pieces brown?

That brown line is scorch from the laser, not paint and not a printed border. The beam lightly burns the wood as it cuts. It's normal, it's common on laser-cut wooden puzzles, and it cannot be cleaned off. I'd gently suggest learning to like it.

Are the whimsy shapes designed by a computer?

No. The laser cuts a file, but a person draws that file and decides where each fox, star or leaf hides in the artwork. A single puzzle can hold forty or fifty of them placed by hand, and that handwork is the slow part of making one.

Does the printing fade over time?

UV-cured ink sets as a tough film bonded to the surface rather than soaking into the grain, which helps keep the colours crisp. Like any printed art, keep a finished puzzle out of long-term direct sun and it should last well.

References

• Basswood properties (soft, light, straight grain, fine even texture, easy to work). The Wood Database.
• How UV-curable ink cures by polymerization under UV light rather than by evaporation. Wikipedia, "UV curing"

Last updated June 7, 2026. Written by Simon I., who founded Opus Puzzles and has personally drawn more whimsy-piece files than he can count.