Sears Tower 3-D Puzzle

And now, for a previously-written report on the Sears Tower 3-D Puzzle

Back in the spring, I picked up a couple of 3D puzzles at the local flea market. I promised you I would report back when I tried to put them together.
Over about a week of very hot weather recently, during which I spent a lot of time in my basement, I attempted to put together one of the puzzles, Hasbro-Wrebbit’s Puzz 3D Sears Tower from their Towers made to Scale collection.

Before I began, I attempted to count the number of pieces in the (previously opened) box. (There are supposed to be 532 pieces.)
I am going to blame it on the heat. I counted all the pieces three times and got three different numbers.
I decided I’d go ahead and try and put it together. I knew that in all likelihood, there would be missing pieces, but I thought maybe I’d get lucky and it wouldn’t matter too much.

Optimism!

This puzzle takes awhile to (almost) put together. Many pieces are very similar to each other – I had several instances of “false positive” matches I had to pull apart and piece together again in different places.

I worked on the puzzle for an hour or two a day for about a week, plus most of an offline Sunday afternoon and evening. I would say that in total, it took me close to eighteen hours to get as far as I did – however, some of that time was spent quite inefficiently as I didn’t really have enough space for proper sorting and ended up sorting multiple pieces multiple, multiple times. I’m also just not that good at puzzles right now. (I don’t do them that regularly.) I would guess that an experienced puzzle hobbyist could budget about 12 hours to this project.

I was pleased to discover that despite the fact this puzzle came out of the box (very) partially completed I got farther along with this particular copy of the puzzle than anyone else ever has. I know this because I was punching out little foam bits from pieces to create the holes they needed for connecting with the internal frame structure. Obviously the people who had this puzzle before me never got as far as removing all the waste pieces.

Sadly, somewhere along the way, this copy lost several pieces.
I hope that whoever donated this box to the flea market didn’t know there were missing pieces, or at least that they didn’t know that it was missing at least one important piece. But it turns out that there was at least one important piece missing, a piece that is needed to hold together the tower properly.
As well as several other pieces that were more cosmetic in terms of it’s structure.

So after all the puzzling I did to put together the various sides of the tower mostly together, in the end, I was not able to put the tower itself together.
But, I did enjoy myself (most of the time, when all the same-looking pieces weren’t annoying me.) And with the puzzle work and some podcasts or music playing, it wasn’t a bad way to spend some time keeping cool during the dog days of summer.
And I have saved someone else from the disappointment of a puzzle without all of it’s pieces.

Before I attempt the other two puzzles I picked up from the flea market at the same time, I will make sure to check how many pieces are included in their boxes. I won’t stop counting pieces until I come up with two numbers that are the same, no matter how hot it is!

During the same very hot week, I also read two books and made progress on a short story. It was a good week for hobbies.

What have you been doing during your heat wave?