Both my grandfathers made this puzzle and other wood puzzles in their time. My mom call them “trasbokk” in Norwegian (something like “a difficult thing”). As I am still quite inexperienced to woodworking, I thought it might be a fun project to make one myself.

It is made by three pieces where two of them have the same shape

The width has to be three times the thickness. I used my wooden scrub plane, and then my regular plane to get the right width (faster than sawing it, before cutting them to the right length. The shooting board is made by Adriena Preda, and it is excellent!

With a double marking gauge, I got the markings right before chiseling out the middle.

I made a few mistakes with my chisels. It didn’t help that the material was spruce either, as it is quite unforgiving and easily makes marks. But spruce was what I had.

The last thing was to saw out the middle of two of them, before giving it a coating of colored shellac.

It is not perfect, but it was very fun to make with a little time to spare the last days of my Christmas vacation.