Allegedly, on or about 06 August 2014, Robert Moskowitz sent:
Using fdisk and parted, I can see my problem, and this won't work. The target card IS smaller than the source. But I can 'fix' that if there is a partition resize command where I can specify the end block in the resize. No reason I cannot shrink sdb3 to what will fit on the target card.
Just wondering about a simplistic solution: Partition the card, the original one, so that you don't use the whole card, by default. Then, when you clone the working partition of your template card, it's always going to be a bit smaller than your target copies.