Done and Done !

There was a period there when the sanding had become quite tedious, and the sheer number of hours of labor required were way beyond my original estimates.  I persisted, bit by bit, until finally I got over that hump and into the home stretch. 
Now, six months after the original conception I'm very happy to say my puzzle box is finished.

coming along

Glued the sides, and spent many more hours sanding the assemblies to fit into their respective slots, and fitting everything together precisely. 

filing and sanding

For the more intricate pieces I had to use a band saw, which was very imprecise.  Thus I had to cut way over and spend many hours filing and sanding the pieces down to dimension accurately.  So much work!

 Eventually I got them into good shape, and began assembly...

custom jig

Here's my custom jig setup for cutting many of the shorter pieces.
Not all my cuts were as precise as I'd like.  The table saw cuts, even with exactly the same setup, would drift plus or minus up to half a millimeter.  So I just used a shotgun approach and cut several more than I needed, and just selected the cuts with the least amount of drift.

precise

The table saw at Tech Shop SF is nice, but heavily used and not super precise.
Still, I was able to get some fairly accurate cuts.
(plus or minus less than one hundredth of a millimeter)

side split dims 2

revised design, shorter

final design pre fab