George Miller’s Santa Claus Machine awarded for new vision in 3D printing.
By David Mantey
“I am retired, I live up in the hills and my hobby is prototyping,” says George Miller, owner and operator of Sonoma, CA-based Puzzle Palace. He found a love for puzzles in his retirement and rather than attempting to fill the tall order of tracking down classic puzzles to stock his collection, he decided to get in on the ground floor. Miller found a niche in both prototyping and collecting modern puzzles as they were being invented, growing a collection with a simple “one for you, one for me” operation as he worked with the world’s elite designers.
 Oskar van Deventer (right) on a visit to Miller’s (left) workshop to discuss the production of the Oskar's Exotic collection. |
How did he piece together increasing interest? By offering to prototype the latest creations free of charge.
“I had no idea how big this thing would get. I started out with a laser cutter and I had a novel way of charging for the prototypes, it was free,” Miller shares. “And sure enough some of the designers came around and one in particular happened to be the best designer in the world (Oskar van Deventer). Before long, I was prototyping about half of the new puzzle designs every year.”
It was four years ago when Miller first laid eyes on the Dimension BST 3D printer at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. It was a chapter in his life that he has since titled the “I’m buying that machine” moment. Three months later, 3D printing was up and running at Miller’s shop.
“We stood slack-jawed in front of it, it was a dream come true,” Miller recalls witnessing the BST for the first time with van Deventer standing by his side. “You get something colorful, something workable right from the machine. I could manufacture the puzzles without having to build a mold.”
Crash Course In 3D Prototyping
From the first time Miller powered up the BST, Oskar had already begun sending him intensely complex, three-dimensional puzzles. “(Oskar) was using a program called Rhino to design the puzzles and it was very easy for me to convert to the format the 3D printer needed and print off a copy of his puzzle,” Miller says.
 “Tube Maze,” the first 3D-printed puzzle by Miller was designed by van Deventer. In this early design, the piece traversing the maze needs to go through a parity change before a solution presents itself. |
The first puzzle Oskar sent, the “Tube Maze,” took some trial and error in order to get the process down and produce good puzzles. “When I finally got the knack of it, the puzzles coming out of the machine were fantastic,” Miller adds. He even dubbed the BST the Santa Claus machine, because he would often start a job at night and the next morning the puzzle would be finished, waiting for him like a present on Christmas day.
PuzzlePalace.com now offers “Oskar’s Exotics,” limited edition 3D puzzles that are the brain child of Oskar van Deventer, Miller’s collaborator based out of The Netherlands.
Miller had always dreamt of opening a puzzle store one day with a workshop tucked behind the studio, but owning and operating a retail store was too time-consuming. He found his remedy in PuzzlePalace.com, a site that his computer programmer son built for him in one day. The day after the site went live, Miller had two orders sitting in his inbox.
“I sell a modest amount of puzzles,” he says, “but it’s fun and all the money I make goes back into tools.” The puzzle maker admits that he doesn’t advertise because he doesn’t want to spend all of his time working.
Most of the activity on his site comes from puzzle fans looking for the latest designs in the industry. As a result, Miller notes that he makes about $2.00 per hit on his website. “These puzzles are very difficult to do and made for the really hardcore puzzle enthusiasts, it’s not something that a grandmother is going to give to her grandchild,” Miller adds.
 George Miller refers to “Gear Head” as one of the finest puzzles he has ever made. The puzzle was designed using an idealized head after 3D photos of an actual head included too many flaws. ADVERTISEMENT
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Miller recently made the switch from Rhino CAD software to SolidWorks when his son, who was attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, found some discarded SolidWorks video lectures on a CD that he passed along to his father. Miller watched the lectures, bought the software, and the rest is history, however, he attests that the best way for him to learn the program was to just sit down and try to figure it out on is own.
Due to the expense and the production times, Miller can't exactly line his shelves with an extensive inventory. As a matter of fact, the puzzles aren’t recreated until an order comes in—and only 100 of each puzzle will be sold.
Once A Mild-Mannered Hobbyist, Now An Award-Winning Designer
Miller was recently crowned the winner of the Dimension MV3dp Customer Awards contest, a competition celebrating 3D printing success stories.
Quick TurnaroundMiller recalls a recent e-mail he received from puzzle designer Vesa Timonen. It was a design for a two-piece puzzle that Miller went ahead and printed. (He suggests that one of the few problems that he has with designers is that they’ll send him the file to prototype the pieces, but they don’t always tell him how to put them together.)  The Cast Loop from world renowned puzzle designer Vesa Timonen was prototyped in Miller’s shop before it won the 2007 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition Puzzlers' Award. |
After he printed the two pieces, he reported to Timonen that the puzzle was too good to keep secret and asked if he could send it to a manufacturer. With his permission, Miller sent an email to the president of Hanayama, a Japanese puzzle company, who not only liked the design, but had a business meeting to discuss potential new products rapidly approaching and said that he would like to have the prototype in his hands before the meeting.
Miller made the prototype and shipped it to the president as fast as he could. The company not only liked it, but it was approved as a new product for the next season. The Cast Loop is now manufactured with zinc alloy by Hanayama. It even won the 2007 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition Puzzlers' Award.
Additional information about the Puzzle Palace can be found at www.puzzlepalace.com. |
MV3dP is a write-in story competition designed to showcase and reward the customer narratives that best communicate the value conveyed by entrants’ Dimension 3D printers. Entries are scored in three categories: the value and benefit delivered by the Dimension 3D printer, creativity and the unique quality of the story. Miller took home the top prize and won a one-year supply of ABS material as well as a 32” flat screen television.
“I won a year supply of material, but when I received all the materials for the BST I realized that I really wanted the Elite, which featured a higher resolution and SST, a stronger soluble support material,” Miller shares about his ensuing upgrade.
 An idealized head’s lobotomy. A look at “Gear Head’s” components, the top of the puzzle can be screwed off to reveal the internal gears. |
The Dimension Elite 3D Printer that Miller is in the process of acquiring provides stronger, functional models with finer feature detail and improved surface finish. With an 8” x 8” x 12” build envelope, the printer uses a stronger ABS material, ABS
plus, which can be 40 percent stronger than standard ABS material making it more suitable for inherently fragile, fine-featured models.
Miller found a new home for his BST, he handed it down to his son.
“For me, 3D printing is something that I had dreamed about 10 to 15 years ago and when I saw it in Chicago I had to buy it, even though I had no idea what I was going to do with it,” Miller states. “It’s said that if you build it, then they come. Well there’s only 50 to 100 (puzzle) designers in the whole world and if it’s free what do they have to lose?.”
Watch a video interpretation of George Miller’s award-winning story at:
http://www.dimensionprinting.com/mv3dp/mv3dp_winner.htm