Goya progress report - Part 11

Just a few scattered bits of black left in the foreground, and the final stretch of night sky. About 700 pieces remaining.

 

The three vertical columns of assembled pieces at the top mark the boundaries between sections - those pieces have smaller, more squarish knobs and are easy to recognize. This puzzle was initially printed on two separate sheets (evidenced by the slight variation in color between the left and right halves, particularly noticeable in the orange foreground). Then each half was first cut into four quarters. Each of those quarters was pressed with an identical pattern of exactly 1000 pieces (40 by 25). But, the patterns are rotated each time, so while the pieces in each 1/8th of the puzzle are identical, they always border opposite-cut pieces. (I hope this makes sense.) Most other large puzzles follow a similar manufacturing process.

 

Already, the fact that each piece has 7 exact duplicates has caused some confusion. I've had to switch out 10-12 pieces that were not initially placed in the correct spot. I'll reach a point where a piece appears to be missing, or I find a piece that fits but it's just not quite the right color. Then I have to scan the puzzle to find where I've misplaced it.

 

I could at this point also use this repeating pattern to my advantage, by building these difficult areas over other already completed sections that have the same pattern. But I've committed to not using this shortcut, because I want to feel like I 'earned it.'

 

 

 

 

 

Between progress report 9 and now, I've been periodically timing myself and analyzing my speed, which is something I've never done before. There's a 2-hour online radio show I often listen to, so I kept a ledger and recorded each 'new connection' I made during that time period. So, if I joined two individual pieces, or one piece to the main puzzle, that was one point. If I added an existing cluster of 6 pieces to the main puzzle, that was also one point. I tried really hard to stay put at the table and tried to get as many connections as I could.

I did this 4 times during the past couple weeks and counted:

89 points

96 points

137 points

106 points

 

This suggests to me that I'm getting somewhere between 45-60 pieces per hour at this stage in the puzzle. (Of course, this point in the puzzle is extremely difficult, so timing myself now is a bit like a runner timing himself running up a steep hill and calling that his normal pace.) The most productive session with 137 points was where I'd really honed in on the buildings in the background.

 

With 700 pieces to go, this suggests to me that I still have 12-16 hours of puzzling left before I finish (though things should go more quickly for the final 100-150 pieces).

 

If I averaged 60 pieces an hour throughout the entire puzzle (which I think is probably lower than actual, but I'll use the number for the sake of simplicity), that would make this entire puzzle about 133 hours to complete. I'm shooting for a finish date of Sunday, Dec. 9, which would be 85 days. Considering that I was out of town for 8 days during that period, that would mean 77 total days of puzzling, with an average of slightly more than 1.7 hours/day. That sounds a little high to me. I'd wager that my average time spent has been more like 1.3 hours/day. Hard to say definitively. On the one hand, there were quite a few days when I didn't work on the puzzle at all, yet several other long, rainy days when I worked on it for probably 4-6 hours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Done