ABOUT US

The Jigsaw Puzzle Factory is owned and operated by Dave and Kath Evans. We live in a small town called Twizel, in the central South Island of New Zealand, close to New Zealand’s highest mountain, Aoraki Mount Cook, which we can see from our deck.

We are surrounded by some of New Zealand’s most beautiful scenery with mountains lakes and rivers just a short drive in all directions.

We have been making jigsaw puzzles since 1996 operating the business from home, supplying the retail, corporate and more recently the personalized market.

Dave in his last incarnation was a pilot, flying ski equipped aircraft around the Mt Cook and Westland National parks, taking tourists from all round the world on spectacular flights and landing them on one of the many glaciers in the area.

Two things happened in early 1995, which got us to where we are today. Firstly Dave was considering a career change, and being a photography nut, was thinking how he might use his stock of landscape photos; and secondly, he came across a very large hydraulic press that was in perfect working order. Being keen jigsaw puzzle people, it didn’t take long to make the connection between photos and the hydraulic press.

That was the easy part!! A year later after many phone calls, faxes, gnashing of teeth and a rapidly dwindling bank account, we had a 1000 piece cutting die (knives) which we had made in England, the engineers, and the press all lined up in the same place.

Four months of trial and error and several phone calls to our very helpful die maker in England, and we were cutting our first 1000 piece puzzle.

The trick is to cut the puzzle onto hardened steel using 650 tons of pressure without wrecking the cutting die. We don’t know how we managed but we did, thanks to a lot of help from some clever and enthusiastic people who really made the difference.

What we won’t make public is a few tricks and pitfalls we learned along the way to achieving a successful cut, but we can guarantee that our 1000 piece puzzles are among the best cut puzzles you will find.

We now have two hydraulic presses, the second is a baby at 80 tons which we use to cut smaller puzzles, but at this stage we will only be offering the 1000 piece puzzles for international orders from this site.

We always believed the time would come where we could offer very low volume orders of the 1000 piece puzzles, but we had to wait for two things to happen: large format digital printing at a reasonable price, and secondly high speed internet access. We now have both, so the time is right to offer a jigsaw puzzle product that is not readily available anywhere else.

Happy puzzling,
Dave and Kath Evans.

 

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