'Just' a couple o’ 6-piece burrs

I’ve recently come across a couple of rather interesting, if not innocuous-looking six-piece burrs. 

The first is a copy of Bill Cutler’s L5 Notchable Burr. One of my puzzling buddies recently decided to slim down his collection a bit and spend the proceeds on some camera equipment – and it would have been rude not to support his new venture, so I bought a few puzzles from him, including this one. 

Giving credit where credit is due, Bill’s website lists this design as being “Discovered by computer program in 1987” – coyly avoiding to mention the fact that he happened to have written the program to explore the possibilities and is the guy who’d been studying these burrs in more depth than anyone else around – so I reckon we can all agree that this is Bill’s design, so what if he used some of the newer tools available to designers. 

As the name suggests, it’s a level 5 burr (i.e. minimum of five moves to remove the first piece) consisting of only notchable pieces (i.e. pieces that can be cut simply by taking notches out of a stick) and it has a unique solution – in fact, it isn’t possible to construct a burr from notchable pieces to give a higher level solution – but there are other notchable designs with the same level... 

This one was made by Jerry McFarland and one of the mahogany pieces has his customary JM stamp on it ... along with the digits ‘71’ – which confuses me as I don’t think it refers to the design, and it can’t be when it was made... any thoughts?

It’s a fun little burr to play with - in spite of it ‘only’ having a level 5 solution, assembling it is a pretty decent challenge, and taking it apart involves a good degree of progressively opening it up more and more before the first piece will emerge – really interesting little burr – and a good spot among the thousands that Bill’s analysis must have thrown up.

The second burr came to me by a slightly more circuitous route – all-round Burr-wizard Guillaume Largounez (yip, the same guy who facilitated those monster burrs!) got in touch a little while back and asked if I was interested in a copy of Abad’s Level 9 burr. 

As it wasn’t a name that I recognised, I did a little surfing and had a look at the pieces laid out on Ishino’s web-site – and one look at the pieces will show you why it’s now a well-known design ... a point that Guillaume made in his email – those pieces are a serious challenge to manufacture! Comparing these pieces to the notchable ones above is like comparing chalk and cheese – a couple of these pieces require all sorts of wood-working shenanigans to get a square corner in there. 

Guillaume had convinced Maurice Vigouroux (yip, him again) to make up a few of these in Satin Bloodwood and after a small dent hit my bank account, one of them duly headed in my direction.

This is a mean little burr... assembled on the shelf it looks like any other standard six-piece burr – but start playing with it and it gets your attention rather quickly – there’s a lot you can do with these pieces, and a few blind alleys to get lost down. The solution appears to consist of a couple of stages where you start by opening things up a bit, then move a piece or two ‘out of the way’ before opening it up some more and eventually, nine moves in, the first piece comes free – at that point you won’t be surprised that it pretty much crumbles in your hands when you see quite how far apart all the bits are at that stage. 

A really interesting burr designed by Rafael Guarinos Abad and expertly made by Maurice Vigouroux – very chuffed to have one of those in my collection – a really unusual little guy.

Nemesis: Monster Packing Puzzles and Big Burrs

Recently I’ve bought a few puzzles that I never expect to solve. 

Weirdo!

That’s probably fair, but hear me out…

The first one is a packing puzzle that came from a recent auction – it’s a copy of Parcel Post made by John Devost in June 2008. It was sitting there looking rather unloved with nobody bidding on it, so I bought it. It’s a really beautiful piece of work – the pieces are made from walnut and the tray is made in padauk with maple slipfeathers. The tolerances between the pieces when they’re packed in the tray properly are incredibly fine – there is virtually no wiggle room at all, yet the pieces literally just drop into place – perfect!

The Parcel Post design has been around for ages (one source quotes “early 1900’s”), although the mists of time appear to have obscured the original designer’s name. The puzzle contains eighteen rectangular pieces to be placed inside a shallow tray. Pretty soon after you start playing with this puzzle, you’ll work out that there will be three layers of pieces in the solution, but that unless some of the pieces are arranged vertically across layers, you’re not going to get very far … and that little twist makes this an absolute killer puzzle in my books. I’ve spent a fair amount of time fiddling around with it and it has beaten me every time. There are too many pieces that could fit vertically and too many ways of almost making up three layers of bits with suitable gaps in them for the vertical pieces – I’m satisfied that I’m beaten, but it looks great in the collection, so it’s going to stay.

So that’s my first nemesis… (By the way, what is the plural of nemesis?) 

The other two puzzles that are likely to defeat me forever are fairly recent acquisitions. They are Big Burrs by literally any definition – first off, they are eighteen-piece burrs, the smaller of the two has pieces that are 12 centimetres long and the larger’s pieces are 15 centimetres in length. They’re called Tiros and Lange Wapper 14 respectively – both creations of Alfons Eyckmans’ fertile mind – although these are both variants of the original design with variations added by Guillaume Largounez to eliminate the alternative assemblies. The puzzles were made by Maurice Vigouroux and they came via a slightly circuitous route via Guillaume through my puzzling mate Chris – the Puzzle-Place guy. They are pretty unique as these burrs aren’t often manufactured (they present a couple of manufacturing challenges like blind corners and weak elbows that a lot of folks might avoid – but Maurice handles them with apparent ease – and some hand-chiselling and dowel reinforcement if you’re interested). They’re beautifully finished, including some decorative finishing around the edges of the pieces so that when properly assembled, the bevelling matches – and provides a unique solution – nice touch Guillaume! Take a look at Chris’ ‘special’ copy over here – it is simply gorgeous! 

The ‘easier’ of the two, Lange Wapper 14 was shipped disassembled as an assembly challenge – chance would be a fine thing! The complete solution requires 70 moves – removing the first piece from a completed burr takes 14 moves, and the next two pieces take another 21 and 15 moves respectively – now can you see why I think it’s a monster?! “Assembly challenge” may be a little bit of an understatement!

Tiros

Tiros, mercifully was shipped assembled (and it may well stay largely that way forever! – Nah, at some point I’m going to take it apart just so that I can say I have!). This particular monster requires 150 (!!) moves to release the first piece(!) and I think it currently holds the record for burr level on a standard 18-piece burr – a further 36 moves dispatch the remaining pieces to a pile on the desk.

These burrs are lovely, and given their pedigree, I’m very chuffed to have been able to add them to the pile o’ puzzles I try hard not to call a “collection”. But do I stand a hope in heck in of ever working out how to take them apart and put them together again (without the use of Master Röver’s software) – I very much doubt it …

So there you are, three of my current nemeses, or nemesi if you prefer, to answer my own question…