I was watching my aunt put together a jig-saw puzzle and I thought to myself…How do they make a jig-saw puzzle. I would guess that the image is printed on a peice of cardboard, but how do they cut them out? Do they have a special cutting tool? If so how do they change the pattern so that each puzzle doesn’t go together the same way. I guess this is a case of what my mother always say’s “There is no such thing as a stupid question…Just stupid people!”
My parents own a puzzle store, and while I am not an expert on how they actually make the puzzles, I can say one thing: with some companies, all the puzzles of a particular size do fit together the same way. I’d imagine they just use some machine that punches through the cardboard for those. I can’t say anything about how they would efficiently cut a whole bunch of puzzles that don’t fit together the same way, though.
The process used is called die-cutting. The die consists of a SHARP set of knives that have the shape of the cutouts, all in a continuous set. The cardboard with the printed picture is placed on a platen, usually a stiff piece of rubber, and the die is pressed through the cardboard and into the platen.
If the knives are not replaced often enough, you get pieces that are not cleanly cut and have to be hand separated.
I’ll admit that this is second hand knowledge, but I used to know some folks that used this same process to die cut balsa wood model airplane kits, and they told me that puzzles were made the same way. If the knives are not sharp, you get parts that are “die crushed” rather than die cut.