Jigsaw Missing Piece 3D Printed Replacement.

In this Instructable I would like to show you how I made a replacement piece for a Space themed Jig-Saw Puzzle, the puzzle was meant to be given as a gift for a friends son, it was bought as new from a Charity shop but without the wrapping which is always a bit suspect anyhow my wife put the puzzle together and guess what? a piece was missing, we wouldn't normally bother doing anything about it but the narrative is so good it's worth pursuing in this case.

The pieces are quite big and nearly 2mm thick which is unusual for a Jig-Saw but perfect for a young person to play with and ideal for making a replacement.

Anyway it's worth a try for a little effort.

3D Printer.

1.75 Filament.

Some sanding paper or wet and dry paper.

Some suitable paints to match up the piece to the rest of the Jig-Saw, Acrylic paint in this case.

Water.

Spray Lacquer.

I'm going to be using Fusion 360 to replicate this piece, that way I can create the shape and get the correct depth bearing in mind that there is paint and lacquer to apply which creates depth.

A Jig-Saw piece is quite a complicated piece to replicate and get the gaps right etc, and there are a couple of ways that I can think to do it, initially it was to put some paper underneath where the piece is missing and using a fine pen to create an outline to work from, then take a photo directly above it and import this into Fusion using the Insert Canvas tool, I mean if you had suitable card and a very sharp xacto knife you could use that, the pieces more resemble plastic than card, anyway another way I could achieve this is to just take a photo of the missing piece area in the Jig-Saw itself then Insert this and trace around it, I will use both options and see which turns out best, these pieces wont take long to print.

Ok so the first thing to do is to create a new sketch within Fusion, then using the top plane for our work space we select that plane and import the image of the missing piece using Insert Canvas, use the opacity slider to achieve the best result to outline.

We can manipulate the piece to set it up correctly within the sketch and then we can measure 2 points on the missing piece and calibrate it so we can get the exact dimensions.

With these ingredients in place we can now use the Fit Point Spline tool and trace around the contours of the piece, zooming in makes it easier to follow the contours, if you find it's going off in the wrong direction just stop at that point and start again, as long as the spline is continuous and end to end it will extrude.

When the contours are traced we can then use the extrude tool to extrude the component to 1mm initially for a trial fit, then tweaks can be made if needed, the actual pieces are approx 1.92mm depth so when happy with the fit we can leave some wiggle room for paint, say extrude to 1.8mm and build the deficit up with lacquer, I will add a very fine fillet to to the top of the piece to finish off the design stage.

Now I can move on to the paint stage:

At this point I am going to lightly sand the piece with wet and dry to give a smoother surface to work from and then a quick rub with methylated spirit to give a clean surface, at this stage I can start to apply some paint.

The paint I have to hand is a set of small tube acrylic paints, the paint is actually quite thick but this can be thinned with water as long as its mixed well, I don't have a primer as such so I will apply a few coats of the thinned orange which is the primary colour.

I'm no artist but it's not a complicated piece of art work, some Orange with a yellow hue and a quarter of not too realistic planet in brown to finish off to match the adjacent pieces.

My pallet is a piece of Amazon cardboard and with this, the paint/artist brush and a small container of water, as above, the initial thing to do is to get some orange onto the piece, this will be the foundation for the piece, using some images of the jig-saw I'm surprised at how close the match is to the orange on the Jig-Saw, this a just a cheap set of acrylic paints, after applying a few thin coats of of the orange onto the piece, I use a 0.5 black felt tip pen to outline the planet shape which is missing and the top of one of the signs plus a thin white stripe with black outline.

For the Planet colour I used a combination of Burnt Umber and Raw Sienna, this too blended in really nice and once dry there are some black dimple shapes on the planet, I just Randomly drew these in with the fine marker pen.

I mixed some yellow paint with the orange and blended in to get the orange/yellow flame effect and then finished off the white pieces with Acrylic white chalk marker pen which ran into the orange a bit, I easily corrected this with a dab of the orange.

Finally I just gave it a light coat of a clear lacquer and left that to dry for a good while.

The Test:

The Jig Saw was still assembled minus the missing piece so it was time to pop the piece in and see what it looked like, both my wife and I were taken aback by how good the likeness of the colours were to the real thing and how it just blended in, it really annoys me when a piece is missing and I don't do Jig-saws but my wife just takes it in her stride as it happens on numerous occasions, that's what you get when buying from charity shops etc, but they are all for good causes and this particular Jig-saw will give our friends boy a couple of hours/days fun so happy days all round.

There you have it, all is not lost when there is a Jig-saw piece missing, with a little effort a replacement can be made and the Jigsaw is complete again.

I hope you enjoyed this Instructable and thanks for looking in.