Everyone who keeps up with me here at thepuzzlesivedone knows that I have completed a lot of Springbok puzzles. The vintage ones are some of my all time favourite puzzles both for quality and the kitsch of the images. Until last week, I had never assembled a 2000 piece Springbok puzzle!
At Value Village a few weeks ago, Joe, my puzzle enabler, had convinced me to buy this puzzle. He noticed how I kept going back to it and sighing, so he pulled it out and walked to the cashier. The dimensions of this puzzle were huge! The pieces were the usual larger, random cut shapes, so all together they made for a very big puzzle. I sorted the pieces by colour, which I don’t normally do but I had no space to actually lay all the pieces out like usual. I assembled individual cars and layered them on top of each other until I was ready to try and connect all my puzzle islands.
As I started the fill in, the pieces with tiny bits of car or chrome, black background or the white dividing lines, it became clear to me that I was missing a lot of pieces. I already knew that it wasn’t complete because I had some of the bright colour pieces missing and definitely didn’t have them in my last pile. But I hadn’t expected it to be missing so many of the background pieces.
As you can see above, there are big chunks in the bottom right corner and scattered throughout that just aren’t complete. I will admit that I had a few pieces left but I stopped puzzling. For all I knew, they might not have actually connected to anything and just been floating in those big gaps! We were also going through a record heat wave here in BC and puzzling while sitting on the floor in the heat was painful.
So I decided to call it, I still had a fun time and I was happy to be assembling a puzzle with a larger piece count, it had been while! This vintage Springbok called Classic Cars dates back to 1987. I’m really not certain how many pieces were missing due to the random cut but I would estimate somewhere near 100 – 150 pieces.
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