40,320 pieces - the biggest Ravensburger puzzle

The ten Disney film scenes were meant to form a single picture, so an illustrator authorized by Disney redrew each scene by hand. He spent around 650 hours sitting at the computer before he could send his completed work to Ravensburg.

Series production begins: the scenes for Snow White and friends have arrived at at the pre-press stage for offset printing. Here, a member of staff at the PC initiates the exposure of the printing plates for the image. This means that for each of the four print colors, the puzzle image will be transferred as a light-sensitive layer to the aluminum plates, using a chemical process. A separate print plate will be exposed for each of the print colors cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

Once the press is set up and the test proofs are flawless, the printer fills the offset printing press to ready it for series production with linen-embossed paper from the Black Forest, specially made for Ravensburger.

Yellow, cyan, magenta and black. The four color towers of the press roll one color after the other at high speed onto the white sheets of paper. Up to 18,000 sheets an hour are printed. The prints are then varnished, dried and stacked.

Snow White, Bambi, Peter Pan. All ten Disney film scenes go through the same procedure, until – as here – they are printed and laminated and ready for the biggest challenge in the manufacturing process: punching the pieces to form a puzzle!

A member of staff places the laminated cardboard sheets of the first film scenes into the puzzle-punching tool. Two edges have already been pre-cut in the typical interlocking cut. With the weight of a thousand tons behind them, the sharp steel band blades cut the picture into 4,032 pieces, which fall directly into a plastic bag. To prevent anything from staying stuck in the machine, a rubber part reliably presses out the punched pieces.

All ten images are punched, ready in their bags and being packed together with the image reference and instructions into an extra large folding carton. Then we can put the lid on the biggest Ravensburger puzzle of all time. With a weight of around 20 kilos, it is also the heaviest by quite a margin and needs two strong people to heave it onto the pallet. The pallet has only enough space for eight such puzzles.

A special conveyor vehicle moves the record-breaking puzzles into storage in the company’s own high-bay warehouse – ready for delivery to eager puzzle fans in Germany, Europe and around the world.

Siglinde Nowack, international product manager at Ravensburger, talks about the special aspects of choosing the image and producing this world record-breaker, as well as about the puzzle fans who are prepared to face the challenge of assembling the puzzle.