Marbled Walnut Sheet Cake

Perry McDaniel makes some very fine cakes. I’ve had several in the hoard for a while now, but this one had eluded me for quite a while. Whenever I found one on an auction, it seemed someone else wanted it a lot more than I did, so when I was recently offered a copy out of the blue, I didn’t really have to consider my response for very long… and now I have a slice of Marbled Walnut Sheet Cake too.

This was Perry’s own exchange puzzle at IPP26 in Boston and it resembles, rather nicely, a corner slice of neatly iced walnut cake. As you’d expect of a walnut cake, it’s made of, err, walnut, complete with, I think, maple frosting. A classic combination in any kitchen.

It’s worth spending a little time admiring the packaging, complete with its nutritional information – there’s a lot of fibre in there! And a bit of crushed bugs…

Look at it carefully and you’ll spot some trademark, slightly impossible, dovetails in the centres of the walnut sides, and there appears to be something inside there rattling.

If you’ve solved a few of Perry’s dovetails before it should take you too long to solve, but this one does have a neat little kicker to it. Get past that and you’ll expose the little void inside which carries a cute little bit of treasure – which may have been what you heard rattling around inside there at the beginning…

The tolerances are quite amazing on this little box – it has a void inside, it’s a box! – it’s definitely worth bearing the notes about caring for the puzzle and caring for the puzzler in mind as the sharp, pointy bits are indeed very sharp and very pointy!

Definitely another classic bit of baked goodness from the master confectioner.

A double-double helping of dovetails

I’ve had a slowly growing pile of dovetail puzzles on my shelf-of-things-to-be-blogged-about for a little while now and the time has come to rectify that! So here you go – a bonus-length blog post featuring 4 fantastic puzzles!

The Sandfield Joint was, I suspect, the first of the genre – crafted by Perry McDaniel, it was Norman Sandfield’s exchange puzzle at IPP14 in Seattle. It consisted of a pair of wooden blocks (Mahogany and Padauk) apparently joined by a pair of intersecting dovetail joints – the first classic impossible dovetail? 

It’s not a super-tricky puzzle, particularly if you’ve already seen the impossible dovetail idea before, but the locking mechanism might take you a little while to figure out. Probably the simplest and most honest of the various dovetail puzzles out there… another reason why I’m inclined to believe it was the beginning of the genre... a good introduction to the series, one to give you a false sense of accomplishment! 

At the next year’s IPP in Tokyo, Robert Sandfield exchanged his Dovetail and a Half – a triangle where each side of the triangle has a dovetail joint on it… so clearly one half of a dovetail must be missing somewhere, inside? Perry McDaniel was on puzzle-crafting-duty once again and the same woods (Mahogany and Padauk) make up the opposing halves of this puzzle. 

Whereas the Sandfield Joint may be a reasonably straightforward puzzle, Dovetail and a Half is not!

My copy came from a friend and I struggled for quite a while to separate the two halves… failing miserably. When a puzzling mate came around to collect some puzzles, I gave it to him to demonstrate for me quickly, and he failed to open it as well… at the next MPP I gave it to the solver-of-all-puzzles not expecting it to remain locked together for more than a few seconds in his dextrous hands… but it would not yield to him either… had I bought a copy that had somehow become locked up? I began to have some doubts, so I did the only sensible thing and bought a second copy – one that came with a copy of the solution… which was a bit different to what we’d all assumed the solution was – and that extra step or two had totally baffled every single one of us – of course if you do the right thing on my supposedly impossibly-locked-up copy, it opens up perfectly… Perry’s tolerances remain perfect fifteen years on – it’s just the stupid puzzler who thinks he knows what he’s doing that can’t open the thing! 

 

Next up is Sandfield’s Cutaway Dovetail Puzzle – Robert’s 1999 exchange puzzle. From the pictures you should be able to tell that it’s form Perry McDaniel and once again uses the same woods – nice little bit of continuity in there?

At first glance, this one resembles a slightly enlarged Sandfield Joint, except that someone has taken a bandsaw to it and cut out one of the corners – leaving the inside edges significantly rougher than the rest of the puzzle. (Nice touch, that!) 

Interestingly on this puzzle, a casual shake of the puzzle reveals something rattling around inside… treasure perhaps, or just part of the locking mechanism – who knows, eh? ;-) 

The locking mechanism on this one is a wee bit different and hopes to catch the unwary who think they’ve understood the ones that have come before and know where this one’s probably heading… 

Finally in this bunch of dovetails, one that looks totally out of place – Dovetail Cherry Surprise Cake was Norman Sandfield’s IPP23 exchange in Chicago… it doesn’t take much imagination to see Perry McDaniel’s lovely creation as a mouth-watering slice of (wooden) cake. This one really stands out from the others, both in terms of its size and its complexity…

If you look carefully at the sides, you can make out a couple of dovetails which should give you a clue as to how things might come apart, but this chap has a few nasty surprises for puzzlers – there are a few distinct phases to getting into the final secret compartment to discover the hidden cherry surprise (cute touch!) – but not only that, there are some rather unusual discoveries long the way – and there’s definitely a sequential discovery aspect to it all as well… a lot of the old tricks, and some news ones are used in there – it’s not just beautiful, it is a seriously testing puzzle!

Sandfield’s Unlocked Drawer

Way back in October 2012 I wrote about Robert Sandfield’s Locked Drawer – I really liked it, you may recall. 

What I didn’t mention at the time was that it had a younger brother, also beautifully crafted by Kathleen Malcolmson, called the Unlocked Drawer… it’s taken me a couple of years to find a copy for sale, but earlier this year I was able to find a copy of Robert Sandfield’s IPP27 exchange puzzle, and I feel obliged to yabber about it on here…

Now when I saw it has a younger brother, there is a very clear family resemblance: they share the same external features, but they’re made of different woods. The Unlocked Drawer has a beautiful Lacewood exterior surrounding a rather similar looking drawer to the one in the Locked Drawer… and there’s a similar rattle when you shake it. 

You’re told your goal is to retrieve the Texas Quarter from inside the drawer… 

Unlike it’s younger sibling, however, this drawer doesn’t simply slide open and present the coin, in fact, a fair amount of coaxing and tugging will not encourage it to budge a mere millimetre. 

A very close inspection of the drawer itself doesn’t yield much at all – except that it is VERY firmly locked in place… there is literally no play on the drawer whatsoever.

As you’d expect, when you finally work out how to open this box, there are a pair of beautifully crafted dovetails keeping everything where it should be… did I mention that Kathleen presented a masterclass on dovetails in puzzles at IPP36? :-)

More Strijbos Dovetails!

If I didn’t know better, I’d think that Wil Strijbos had a thing for dovetail joints – not content with bringing the puzzling community a pair of concave and convex impossible dovetails, Wil recently added not only a third one to that set, but also an entire new set of Impossible Dovetail Cubes in some really funky colours.

Dovetail the third, adds a new twist to the Convex / Concave Dovetail set, although the family resemblance is still clear through the common colouring of a green piece and an uncoloured aluminium piece. From some elevations this dovetail looks quite pedestrian, however when viewed from the top, the brain gets a little frazzled. More so if you happen to see the edges and the top together. 

As usual there’s a locking-mechanism in there to be defeated before the two pieces can be parted – and in case you’re wondering, yes, each piece is a single colour!

Wil’s standard challenge with his dovetails is for the puzzler to work out from an inspection of the outside, what the shapes of the pieces must be in order for this to work – and this one presents a rather neat little mental challenge … in fact if I hadn’t seen one made in wood a little while ago and seen some notes on making them in E.M. Wyatt’s classic book on crafting wooden puzzles, I’d have been scratching my head for quite a while longer!

The Dovetail Cubes are a reasonably recent addition to the family and come in rather colourful varieties. Externally, the cubes all look mechanically the same – all impossible, but all the same. They each appear to have a set of crossed dovetails with a dovetail joint between the top and bottom halves on each face. Wil’s challenge to puzzlers is to work out how they might work mechanically, while telling you that all three are quite different.

The cubes employ a locking mechanism as usual and each have their own little surprise when you open them up … they are all totally different and if you haven’t already played with this sort of puzzle before, you’ll probably find at least two of them are a little unexpected. Once you see the mechanism, they make total sense and it’s hard to get them out of your mind (a bit like learning the secret behind a magic trick – the trick and the accompanying wonder are banished forever) – but what lasts for ages is the quality of the machining and the fit between the pieces – the tolerances are really exceptionally tight leaving no slop in the fit at all.

When Wil was visiting a short while back, he had a couple of prototypes for us to fiddle around with and he was explaining that one of them required some custom-made tooling to machine – and you can see why – but the results are terrific.

One little finer point I really liked was the attention to detail on the locking mechanism, where an extra piece or two has been added to trap the mechanism and prevent it from falling out when the pieces are separated … nice!

If you like Wil’s (not-so-)heavy metals, then you really ought to add a set of these to your collection – fun to fiddle with and a nice little challenge for non-puzzlers to think about.

Sandfield’s Banded Dovetail

Sandfield’s Banded Dovetails was Robert Sandfield’s IPP Exchange puzzle in either 2008 or 2009  – it comes in a grey drawstring pouch announcing it as “Sandfield’s Banded Dovetail Puzzle / IPP29 – San Francisco / 28^th International Puzzle Party, Prague 2008”  – and I’m guessing there’s a good story in there, but afraid I can’t find anything about it in my research on the inter-web. (But maybe someone will drop by and clue us in...?)

Brian Pletcher has written about his experiences with the Banded Dovetails over here. 

 

The Banded Dovetails continue the Sandfields’ association with tricked-out dovetail joints. Over the years they’ve given the puzzling world some rather impossible looking dovetail joints and used them to disguise some sneaky tricks.  Rob Stegmann has a brilliant collection of Sandfield puzzles over here – take a look for yourself. 

This particular puzzle has a pair of contrasting coloured boards joined by a set of beautifully made dovetails which appear to run the length of the boards. These boards are then surrounded by a pair of wooden bands that seem to be pinned to the boards themselves. All this pinning and the joints themselves give the impression of a rather well-secured little object, which invites you to find, and open, the hidden compartment.

Prodding and pushing the various bits leave you with the distinct impression that actually the makers are having a bit of a laugh and they’ve in fact glued everything together and there is no hidden compartment at all – except there’s an odd little rattle inside there somewhere… 

Suffice it to say that “the usual” attempts don’t yield an awful lot, but when you do find the solution, it will put a grin on your face. 

Kathleen Malcolmson has done a tremendous job of building this little illusion and then hiding its secrets from even the very closest of inspections – beautiful workmanship and incredible attention to detail.