Jerry McFarland’s BurrBlock

Back in late 2011 one of my local puzzling mates got in touch and made me an offer I was never going to refuse – he’d been in touch with Jerry McFarland and Jerry had come up with a new puzzle design that he was looking for some feedback on ... so in return for some thoughts on the puzzle, I’d get to play with something totally new, and as it turned out, an entry in the 2012 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition.

Jerry’s BurrBlock was duly delivered and I spent a while working out how to take it apart: tricky at first, and then once you think you’ve got the hang of it, it kicks you in the gut! Get past that bit, and you’re thinking to yourself that if this is like some of Jerry's  other designs, it should be plain sailing from there, only it isn’t...

I spent a while playing around with the puzzle and eventually had to give it back to Chris, so I jotted a few notes off to Jerry more or less along the lines that I thought it was a cracking puzzle and if he ever decided to make any available for sale, I’d love to get hold of one... I couldn’t suggest any improvements and told him I particularly liked the two stages in the puzzle – and that the second stage was anything but simple... Chris on the other hand had been far more helpful, and had in fact managed to suggest the name that ended up sticking: BurrBlock.

Jerry must have had some similar feedback from the other folks he was talking to because the eventual design that he entered in this year’s IPP Design Competition was more or less unchanged from the one that we played with almost a year before – in fact the only differences were so subtle that Jerry had to point them out to me – and they were about reducing the number of parts in the manufacturing process and didn’t change any of the puzzling aspects at all... so Jerry pretty much got it spot on from the start of this development – well done that man!

Several months later Jerry got in touch and offered to sell me a BurrBlock and I jumped at it right away... it’s not a small puzzle – heck, it has 37 interlocking pieces and Jerry’s description suggests it’s a “very difficult to take apart cube”. 

He isn’t kidding.

A bit of playing around with it will eventually yield the most likely first line of attack, and it’ll take a fair amount of playing around to get into the swing of things, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll get a bit carried away, think you’re starting to make great progress, only to find your way well and truly blocked!  The first stage is “helpfully” described as 45 steps to remove the four key pieces ... except that hides a little subtlety that bites you if you get a little greedy ... this puzzle rewards patience...

Having removed the four key pieces you might be forgiven for thinking that the frame will begin coming apart ... and you’d be quite wrong – it’s still pretty sturdy and doesn’t give much in the way of clues as to how it might begin coming apart – and that’s the feature that really sold me on this puzzle when I first played with it – it toys with you! Lets you think you’re getting on top of it only to sit back and laugh in your face!

Jerry’s description of the second phase of the puzzle includes phrases like “fifteen non-obvious steps” being required to disassemble the frame – no kidding! Finding how to start disassembling the frame is almost worth the entry price on its own ... and when he says “non-obvious”, that’s a pretty decent understatement – it’s pretty darn unusual!

Persevere and you can reduce the frame to a large pile of uniquely McFarland shaped bits – some of which you aren’t likely to have seen the likes of before – very ingenious and makes for a great puzzle. As usual all of the pieces are perfectly machined on Jerry’s home-brewed CNC kit and beautifully polished in the usual McFarland manner – making for a lovely three dimensional sculpture in walnut, mahogany and maple.

I think it’s a terrific puzzle ... thanks Jerry for letting me play around with the prototype and then offering me one of my own...

Another Piston Burr ...

When I met Jerry in Washington DC he mentioned that he’d made up a couple of Piston Burrs and had brought a few in Ebony and Kingwood along for sale at the Puzzle Party on the Saturday, so I made sure that I visited his table reasonably early on in the day. 

 

However, by the time I got to his table, all of the Ebony burrs had already been sold and he only had a few of the Kingwood burrs left ... but looking at the Kingwood version, I’m almost glad I didn’t have to choose between the two – the grain on the Kingwood is quite simply stunning, and I’ve been a fan of Peter Marineau’s Piston Burr since my first copy from Wil Strijbos in aluminium a little while back ... so I picked up a copy in Kingwood...

...and a new project...

At IPP32 Jerry also had a prototype of a new project he’s been toying with for a little while now – a burr set in a puzzle box. He’s designed a box that is itself an interlocking burr arrangement that then holds a set of 42 burr pieces ... and the prototype is looking pretty promising already. Hopefully enough folks will have made enough encouraging noises to Jerry already to help him decide to go ahead and make some of these, but on the off chance that he hasn’t been pushed over the edge, if you’re interested, then please let him know via his web-site and offer him some encouragement. 

Selfishly I’m really hoping he’ll make them up one day because I’d really like a nice hardwood burr set and the idea of having one with the sort of finish that Jerry typically achieves is just too good to pass up on... go on, get in touch with him. You know you want one too...

'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.

Quadlock 1

I’ve written about Jerry McFarland’s puzzles a couple of times before. Not only does he produce Bill Cutler’s puzzles superbly, but he also designs and makes his own puzzles. His website lists a couple of really interesting-looking puzzles, sadly not all of them are generally available. 

Nick Baxter’s latest auction included a couple of these hard-to-come-by puzzles including one of Jerry’s Quadlock 1 puzzles. That piqued my curiosity, so when Jerry’s website announced that he’d be making a new run of Quadlock 1’s in a slightly smaller size, my email to Jerry asking for one was into the ether in minutes ... and a little while later Jerry got in touch and offered me a slight variant for a few dollars extra, so a Walnut, Maple and Cardinal Wood Quadlock arrived in the puzzle cave.

Jerry designed the Quadlock 1 in 1992 and describes it as a 19-piece puzzle that’s difficult to take apart. It takes the form of a slightly squashed cube and it’s pretty clear from the get-go that it consists of a seriously interlocked set of unusually shaped pieces. 

Starting to play around with it you will quickly gravitate toward the four central pieces that seem to have a reasonable amount of vertical play, although playing with them doesn’t seem to do an awful lot ... a bit of experimentation and feeling your way around in the dark leads to some interesting discoveries, and I have to say that the first move caught me out quite a bit in that things didn’t move the way I’d expected them to – nice one Jerry!

The first moves will let you remove a few pieces, but then you need to execute a couple more nifty moves before the next few pieces can be removed, effectively then leaving you with a core and a framework made up of a number interlocking pieces. When I complimented Jerry on the design of the framework, he deflected most of the blame / credit to Bill Cutler for that particular element of the design. 

It’s a great design with one or two little red herrings to amuse the unwary (No, I’m not going to mention those, find them yourself!) and Jerry’s precision makes stumbling across the first part of the solution by accident virtually impossible, while rewarding the careful explorer with plenty of feedback.  

Nice one Jerry! Thanks for making another run of a great design and thanks for my ever-so-slightly unique variant ... looking forward to Quadlock 4 now...

MPP2

Saturday saw the second gathering of puzzlers under the Midlands Puzzle Party banner. Once again Louis took the prize for the furthest travelled (he flew in from Holland for the weekend, again!  Thanks for my Svetnashki Louis.)  Oli and Ali came from the other side of London somewhere and Karl joined us from the other end of Birmingham. We met at my place for an afternoon of puzzling (and caffeine) and then we all decamped to a pub near the NEC for the evening, where we were joined by the hard-working crowd from the Revomaze stand (for yet more puzzling). 

Everyone brought what they had in the afternoon and it was noticeable that quite a few folks had been spending a bit on puzzles since our last get together. As luck would have it I’d received a few nice bits from Mr Puzzle that morning, so I just left them out for everyone to play with – my new Stickmen were all out for everyone to have a go on and most people fiddled around a little, although I suspect that Oli was the only one who had any real success on them during the MPP – Louis made sure he polished off all of them during the weekend at my place, so he probably bagged the most Stick-scalps over the course of the weekend. 

Oli had brought along his Sandfield Salt and Pepper cellars for me to play with, but sadly I was too thick to do any more than play with the magnets a bit – essentially I got nowhere, but I got to see firsthand how brilliant these little guys look – Perry McDaniel really is a wizard at fine trick dovetails.

There was a lovely selection of Vinco’s on display with most folks taking a turn at opening and closing them and watching the mesmerising interplay of exploding bits and elegant co-ordinated motion. I spent a while fiddling with Roger’s Propeller (not much joy there either!) although I did have a wee bit more joy confirming that my solution for Roger’s R2D2 did in fact work ... although I failed miserably on Alles Roger. 

A couple of Wil Strijbos’ puzzle bottles kept a few folks quiet for a good while... and if I can work out how to get the chain locked inside the bottle again (without using a pencil, ahem!) I’ll be a happy man!

One of the puzzles I was keen to inflict on as many people as possible was Jerry McFarland’s (imminent) Burrcube#1 – I wanted to see how widely it was enjoyed and how long people took to solve it so that I could give Jerry some more feedback on his new design – most folks had a go at it and everyone seemed to think it was a nice little puzzle, so here’s hoping that he starts producing them and does a series of them...

Before we decamped to the pub to meet the rest of our number, Oli very kindly gave me a set of his Oli-original Soma Dice as a thank you for hosting the day. [He doesn’t realise that I offer to host it so that I don’t have to travel miles cross-country!] I got my own back by handily having a set of Robert Yarger’s sci-fi books autographed for the guys who were attending the MPP, and they seemed to like the fact that they got a Stickman book along with the chance to play with some Stickman boxes. (Thanks Gilly, that was a cool idea!) 

Decamping to the pub was deemed a good idea because this MPP happened to coincide with the Gadget Show Live where Chris Pitt had a Revomaze stand that most of us spent a while at over the course of the weekend... Louis and I met up there on Friday and spent a few hours chatting to folks about puzzles in general and Revomazes in particular, while Nigel and Chris (not-the-Pitt) spent several whole days helping out on the stand... how they coped I don’t know – I was just about hoarse after a couple of hours ... 

Anyway, by meeting up at the pub, we could see the guys from the stand without them having to go too far out of their way from the NEC – unfortunately I hadn’t checked out the pub properly beforehand and booked a table, as a result we could sit outside with drinks (thankfully the weather was rather kind!) but we couldn’t get anything to eat. (Sorry guys!) A couple of times during the evening, someone would ask if we were going to get some food somewhere else, but there were too many puzzles around for them to be taken seriously and we ended up staying there for the evening.

We ended up with a pretty different set of puzzles at the pub, mainly due to the new influx of GSL-types, so there were a bunch of Constantin puzzles and a couple of rather interesting packing puzzles ... I’d taken my copy of Coffin’s Four Fit and Oskar’s Two Piece Packing puzzle along – everybody loved the latter and everybody hated the former. (Because they couldn’t solve it, not because it’s not a nice puzzle, he hastened to add!)

One of the highlights for me was being asked by Mark (he of Mark76 fame on the Revomaze forums) to hand Chris Pitt a small gift at the MPP. Mark has been enjoying his Revomazes so much, that he decided he needed to make a key ring-sized version (he collects key ring puzzles) ... so he got himself set up with a lathe and a mill, learnt some new skills and proceeded to produce the tiniest Revomazes known to man – when he posted his pics on the Revomaze forums there was quite a lot of excitement (and more than a couple of offers to buy them!) – so when Mark got in touch the week before MPP2 and asked if I’d mind handing them to Chris as a gift from him, I jumped at the chance... long story short:  Royal Mail got them safely down to my place – I put them in the light tent and took a couple of nice pics of them (and couldn’t resist having a little bit of a play with them – you should have seen the smile on my face when it went click as I fell into a trap!) before boxing them up and eventually handing them to Chris at the pub that evening ... I think he was impressed by what Mark has done, and his face was an absolute picture when he started playing with the larger one and promptly found the first trap ... gotcha! Payback time! Plenty of folks managed to have a go on them and without fail, they were impressed by what a bloke with a lathe and a mill has taught himself to do on such a tiny scale – nice work Mark! (and thanks for making me a part of it all ...)

While we were at the pub (before we realised that we wouldn’t be able to get any food!) Nigel gave me a Pentangle Vertigo burr as a thank you ... thank you, mate. 

One of the other great little features of the MPP was the Box o’ Bounty, donated by a puzzling friend who couldn’t even be with us, but wanted some of his old puzzles to go to a good home... at the first MPP, folks were a bit shy and we had quite a few things left over in BoB, this time they got into the spirit of things and there was a healthy redistribution of puzzles, making sure that they generated even more enjoyment! Thank you mystery donor of the Box o’ Bounty – it went down well! (... and in the interests of full disclosure - I liberated a couple of twisty puzzles and have added them to my sparse collection of twisty puzzles...) 

I suspect that a couple of take-out joints between Barston and Warwick / London saw a couple of ragged, smiling puzzlers seeking out some food late that evening... Louis and I discovered that at that hour of the night, the only place near my house still open for business was the local Chinese take-out. [Duck and crispy shredded beef, respectively, before another puzzling session at the dining room table ended a great day...]

(Thanks Louis for the pics.)

A burr is a burr is a burr, or not!

Bill Cutler’s Wausau Burrs

Right, so everyone knows that Bill knows burrs – his research into 6 piece burrs is legendary and probably forms the basis of mainstream burr-knowledge and notation in use today. Bill’s used a number of the burrs resulting from his exhaustive research  as the basis for some lovely puzzles, adding the odd twist here and there (“Would sir like ball bearings in that?”) and letting some of them stand on their own (Computer’s Choice?). At some point during this work, Bill decided to try something a little different – and this led to the Wausau series of burrs.

From the outset, you can tell these little guys are different: for a start, each of the major axes has an unusual or even a different number of pieces, in fact across the series, you’ll find anything between 3 and 8 sticks in a plane. (OK, except 5 & 7 – you won’t find one with 5 or 7 sticks in a plane … now stop being picky!) 

Not content with just having different shaped burrs, Bill also designed the mechanisms to be ‘interesting’ – so every now and then, one of them will move in a totally unexpected way – in fact quite often, prodding and pulling in ‘the usual way’ won’t get you anywhere … I like puzzles that catch you out by making you assume you ‘know’ something … then sneak up behind you and yell ”BOO!”. Most of the Wausau’s has a “BOO!” in there somewhere.

There are four in the series – numbered ’81 through ’84 (‘cos they were designed in the early 80’s).

Wausau 81: 4*4*4

The first in the Wausau series has a different pattern of 4 sticks on each plane! It looks different ... fiddling around with it quickly reinforces that ... it only takes a few moves to remove the first piece, however there are a number of false starts and little blind alleys that will keep ham-fisted puzzlers at bay for ages. Bill described this one politely as being “non-trivial to take apart”. 

Wausau 82: 3*4*6

There is one that’s often known as the lock-picking one because there’s a bit in the solution where you find yourself effectively trying to “pick a lock” using the pieces in one of the planes as a set of mortises while trying to slide some in an intersecting plane out. The amount of movement is again, unexpected, and will keep overly enthusiastic puzzlers occupied needlessly for hours. Once the lock’s been picked, it’s a pretty straight-forward disassembly… this was Cutler’s favourite of the Wausau series. 

 

Wausau 83: 4*4*6

Bill Cutler describes this as the best puzzle of the Wausau series – it takes 11 moves to release the first piece and involves a little to-ing-and-fro-ing along the way – there’s plenty of movement when you first start out, not all of it’s useful, however...

 

Wausau 84: 3*4*8

This was the last one I received and is an absolute delight – there are a few pseudo-standard burr moves and then you seem to hit a brick wall –prodding and pulling in “the usual way” will get you absolutely nowhere, so you need to start trying more unusual moves – and I have to say that the one that finally does it is a really unusual – almost magical movement. From there on out, it’s a simple matter of removing a piece or two at a time – reassembly on the other hand is quite tricky – mainly because of that funky move, that means you need to get things lined up a bit funky before it all locks together nicely … easily my favourite of the series. 

[In case you’re wondering about the different styles in the photographs – I got ’82 and’83 from Mr Puzzle, so you can see Brian’s signature finishing on the ends of the sticks; and then ’81 and ’84 came from Bill, manufactured by Jerry McFarland – and that’s his polishing on the ends ... sorry, I know it’s a mismatched set ... let’s call it eclectic and be done with it!]

Jerry McFarland’s Burrcube #1

A couple of weeks back I plucked up the courage to drop a few leading lights in the puzzling community an email asking them whether they had any puzzles in stock – one of those was Jerry McFarland ... I’d come across his web-site some time ago and had marvelled at some the equipment that Jerry has in his workshop – clearly he’s serious about making stunning puzzles. 

As luck would have it, Jerry didn’t have the puzzles I was after (and in fairness that’s what his web-site was saying too, but I asked anyway!) but he mentioned that he was putting together a new puzzle of his own design and asked if I’d be interested.

Jerry’s Burrcube#1 (because it’s a burr, in a cube, the first one, and there may be more along ...) is described as a 3*3*3 cube in a box that’s made up of 15 pieces – it sounded interesting and he was offering it at a jolly good price because he was interested in some feedback ... I couldn’t turn down an offer like that!

About a week later a box arrived from Jerry containing a Lovely Burr (I’ll get to that one when I’ve worked out how the heck to get it apart!), a nicely made 5 sided cube and a bag of bits ... object of the Burrcube#1 is to decant bag of bits into box ... but there’s effectively only one way to do that, and the photo that Jerry had of the completed puzzle in the cube deliberately shows you the least useful side ... nice guy, that Jerry!

Usual disclaimer – I’d already told Jerry that I wasn’t the world’s best burr solver and that I wasn’t a big fan of packing problems that relied on brute force – when I said that, he added that someone called Cutler  (yes, HIM!) had played around with the first prototype and enjoyed it and solved it using analysis ... so I'm thinking I’m going to enjoy this...

First off, the bits are all beautifully made – just like everything else that I’ve seen from Jerry. When I initially said that I’d like one, Jerry was a bit apologetic that he hadn’t knocked up any boxes yet, so I got the impression that he was going to knock up something quickly on his table saw - the initial pics I saw had a ply box – which at the price point wasn’t out of place! I certainly wasn’t expecting a beautifully finished walnut box with Jerry’s initials stamped on the bottom along with the serial number 002 ... the inside bits are made in cherry, maple and walnut and are all finished beautifully and fit perfectly. There are a couple of unusual shapes in there. 

You’ll recognise a number of similar pieces and they’ll help you come up with the guts of the solution, and from there it’s really a bit of experimentation to find the right combinations of bits. Thankfully there aren’t any curve-balls like some burrs, where you end up holding the last piece with no apparent means of getting it into the remaining assembly! Right up to the end, you can go backwards and forwards and add in bits...

All in all, it is a lovely little puzzle – it took about 20 minutes of gentle playing and experimentation to find a solution and it shows some lovely patterns on the sides as a result of the three different woods – as I said, the most boring one is the one that Jerry’s using to display the puzzle so as to give you as few clues as possible to the solution...

After I’d solved it, I dropped Jerry a note with some thoughts and some encouragement to develop it into a small series of increasing complexity ... and then we traded emails on how he could give the puzzler even fewer clues to the solution while still giving a genuine photo of the puzzle. [He dismissed my suggestion of making an alternate set of bits in the wrong colours and using a photo of that one’s solution as being too mean ...] – swapping a couple of different coloured pieces that share the same shape might just fit the bill, and give a less symmetrical, but still rather pleasing solution... 

 

If he does start selling them, please encourage him to make some more and expand on his ideas... the world doesn’t have enough puzzles yet... :-)