Tangler

This was another of my Cubic Dissection finds. It’s a Tom Jolly design made by Eric Fuller from curly maple. 

It’s made up of two pieces in a 4*4*4 cube shape, interlocked, but with plenty of space in there. The object is to separate the two pieces and put them back together again.  Without using any force, i.e. if it doesn’t feel like that will work, it won’t - STOP. 

When you first start playing around with the Tangler, there’s plenty to do ... and usually with this sort of puzzle, wandering around aimlessly will teach you a bit about what you can and can’t do, and even sometimes see you solving it ... or not!

  

It’s a delightfully simple looking puzzle, with no moving parts and clearly those two bits of wood must be able to come apart – he didn’t build it like that, surely! [Although the latter might become quite a popular theory after some further exploration.]

There’s a bit of a twist to this puzzle, and it’ll probably not surprise you to find that building it in burr tools will confirm that the eventual assembly is indeed made up of the two parts that you have in your hands, but sadly, it’s not possible to assemble them ... (!)

Solving this one requires some out-the-box thinking and knowing where and when to apply it, as the amount of movement available means there is plenty of scope for blind alleys and dead ends. 

So far everyone who’s played with this one has enjoyed it ... so it must be good!