Fixing Florida Puzzle Piece

A friend of mine had a broken puzzle piece, because some puzzle manufacturer thought it was a great idea to put the handle in Tallahassee, right in the thinnest part of the piece.

So I offered to make a quick fix and cut a new piece for them:

I scanned the broken piece on a flatbed scanner, then did some clean-up and alignment of the parts in Photoshop.
Then I imported the image as a backdrop in Fusion360 to do a profile sketch, and traced the outline.

I cut a test piece in HDPE, then did a few 3d-prints of the shape to fine-tune scaling and details, and then cut a final version in laminate (Formica product sample). Here’s a close-up on the 3d printed version, in orange PLA:

And here’s a close-up of the final cut-out, where you can see that I’ve laminated the Formica to a backer to make it thicker to match the puzzle-piece thickness, and also you can see the tabs I left to hold the piece steady. Some quick work with an x-acto knife will have this out and ready to be drilled somewhere OTHER than Tallahassee!

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