Kostick’s amazing array...

OK, so I got back from IPP32 in Washington DC a couple of weeks ago and so far I’ve only blogged about the events and the people and mentioned the odd puzzle here and there, but I haven’t really talked about any of them in much detail... time to change that!

I’ve made absolutely no secret about the fact that I’m a huge fan of Jane Kostick’s gorgeous wooden geometric assemblies, and I was really happy to see a couple of new Kostick designs in this year’s Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition. One of them had made a sneaky appearance on Jane’s new website a couple of months earlier so I’d been keeping an eye out for it and when Nick Baxter published this year’s entries of the competition, there it was – the 3-Layer Tetraxis Array.

The picture on Jane’s website was pretty spectacular and the combination of the woods and the geometry gave it an almost two-dimensional look – take a look at the top right hand picture. That caught my attention, then when Nick’s picture went up, it had a totally different combination of woods and it looked pretty incredible. The one entered in the competition had Holly blocks at the corners, an internal frame of Wenge, an outer frame of Spalted Apple and a layer of Burmese Rosewood in between those two. It was displayed in one of John’s silicon bronze Tetraxis Star Cradles – itself a lovely little feat of engineering – the Cradle shares the same construction weave as the other bronze stars, but its arms are bowed giving it the silhouette of a wine goblet, or a champagne flute, depending on how wide you spread the arms ... very clever – and makes a fantastic stand for Jane’s woodwork!

I’d had a bit of a fiddle around with the puzzle during the design competition, decided I really liked it and that I’d need to try and get my grubby paws on a copy at some point,  and then tried to avoid it for the rest of the time so that I could enjoy discovering it again ... hopefully...

Three layers separated

 ...and by now, if you’ve read my bit about the N.Y.C. Puzzle Dinner, you’ll know that Jane sold me the competition entry for a jolly good price after she’d convinced herself that it was still in good enough shape after being man-handled by a bunch of puzzlers for five days – I’d already told her it still looked perfect but she wanted to check first... it still looks in perfect condition now as it sits on my desk, having been played with at the dinner in N.Y.C., making it back to the UK and then having several visiting puzzlers have a bash at it and being played with all day at our last MPP – Jane’s work keeps its finish beautifully and takes a lot of playing, with plenty of grace.

Right, so now that I’ve got it home I’ve managed to have a decent play around with it... what’s it all about?

As the name says, it’s made up of three layers of sticks kept in place by magnets. Each layer can be constructed on its own, or in combination with any of the other two – each combination giving you a pretty unique looking piece.

The innermost layer provides a skeleton for the rest of the construction (although each of the other layers is self-supporting in its own right) and is made up to long triangular Wenge sticks that each affix themselves magnetically to an internal rhombic dodecahedron. Once you’ve done that you have a spikey central core that you can wrap the next layer around rather easily. The second layer uses the mid-length Burmese Rosewood sticks to lock onto the Holly blocks at each vertex – the geometry of this layer is particularly cute and it can be seen pretty clearly in the pic on the left. It sort of looks like it should want to collapse in on itself, but the magnets and the geometry do a pretty good job of making it quite stable. The final layer is the Spalted Apple that wraps around the outside. These sticks can be joined in either groups of three or four thanks to the layout of their magnets – and the overall lattice has alternating joints of three and four sticks down any path that you might care to trace. 

 

Each layer makes for a lovely looking piece – having all three together makes for a stunning piece.

I enjoyed playing around with the construction – the middle layer can be a bit disorientating to build on its own – and the simplest way to build it is probably to build the first two layers and then remove the first one from the exoskeleton. Something that also intrigued me was the discovery that if you move the Spalted Apple sticks aside a bit at any of the four-piece-joints, you uncover a perfectly rhombic dodecahedron-shaped hole that will fit one of the Holly blocks perfectly – not sure why that sort of thing still surprises me – it probably shouldn’t by now! Anyhow ... I got to playing around a little and started playing "hide the Holly blocks", and got about half – way round before the structure started letting go – remember that the Holly blocks are holding the middle layer together, so when you remove the blocks, that layer starts sliding apart as there’s nothing holding it together. You can get a pretty good feel for what it would look like – and it totally changes the look of the thing. When Jane and I were chatting about her puzzles in NYC, she mentioned that she was playing around with adding some extra magnets, and if I remember correctly, that might just enable you to place all the blocks inside the structure as I described... and keep it stable.

I was incredibly chuffed when Jane insisted that I take the Tetraxis Star Cradle as a gift because John thought they went to well together – they really do go well together ... but I was seriously embarrassed when she went rooting through the unopened box of spare puzzles submitted to the Design Competition and fished out the Chamfered Cube from that set and handed it over as another present - seriously gobsmacked!

 

 The Chamfered Cube is another multi-layered Kostick creation that starts with a tiny Chamfered Cube (...there was a clue in the name!) in the centre of four sets of three triangular sticks, with each set held together magnetically with a rhombic dodecahedron at each end. [There’s probably a picture below if you can’t wrap your mind around that – and if you can, move along, I can’t teach you anything!] The triangular Purpleheart sticks each lie flat against one of the chamfers, at an angle, leaving a tiny square pyramid of empty space against each face of the little cube. The four sets effectively form a pair of interlocking “X”s about this little Chamfered Cube in the centre, and then twelve shorter Tigerwood sticks connect each of the adjacent RD blocks, completing the structure ... which then looks like a Chamfered Cube ... in fact it looks just like the mini Chamfered Cube EXCEPT that the empty space outside the mini cube has been reversed into negative space on the square sides of the larger Chamfered Cube – neat little bit of symmetry there... :-)

Fiddling around with this puzzle also shows that you can build the exoskeleton using just the Tigerwood sticks and the corner blocks, giving you quite a funky looking zig-zag cube with a lot of space in the middle... and by the way, if you hadn’t already spotted it – take a look at the triangular grain patterns on the external corners of all of the Ash blocks on the corners of the cube ... that didn’t happen by accident.

Thanks again Jane – that was incredibly kind of you ... and I really love them!

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If you’re interested in acquiring any of Jane’s pieces, please drop her an email via her web-site – each piece is pretty much made up to order so once you’ve settled on a design you can choose exactly the woods you’d like and she’ll make it up to your specifications ... oh, and she’s a wonderful person to deal with!

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Neil’s written up an excellent post on all things Kostick from this year’s Design Competition (and then some!) over here – READ IT if you haven’t already...

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By the way ... that little multi-coloured block just above the pen is made up of offcuts from the triangular stock during the manufacturing process - they 'just happen' to go together perfectly to make a rhombic dodecahedron. Neat!!

MPP4

The fourth Midlands Puzzle Party took place yesterday and I managed to con the gang into using our place as a venue yet again so that I wouldn’t have to travel anywhere or pack up any of my puzzles. 
 

Louis, our regular visitor from Eindhoven (and now four time winner of the furthest travelled prize!), arrived on the Friday evening and the puzzling began pretty much as soon as we got back to my place. Next morning the rest of the bunch started arriving thick and fast from about 10 o’clock onwards, and by about 11 virtually everyone was gathered around the dining room table playing with someone else’s puzzle over a cup of tea or coffee. A damn fine start to a good day’s puzzling!

It was great to see a few new faces – Russ and Adin off the Revomaze forum and Jez who’d met Ali and Oli at the 100^th Camden Lock Puzzle Party earlier this month. Jez brought his son Charlie along for the day (which included a 5-hour round trip drive - RESPECT!) – hopefully we didn’t scare any of them off! Speaking of scaring people off, it was great to have the return visit of Paul after his first and only appearance at our very first MPP. 

Most people brought a box-load of puzzles along for the day – most people that is, except for Russ, who brought along a set of lock picks and a practice lock or two – in his defence they are all purely for recreational use, and knowing someone with those sort of skills is bound to come in handy one day  ... Several folks had a go at picking the locks on offer and learning a new skill – although it was a bit worrying when Chris Pitt, the designer of those Revomaze puzzles, was found trying to pick a Revomaze – apparently it was only research and he can open them, properly, anytime he wants (and he didn’t inhale)!

When Oli had arrived he produced the Alles Roger that’s been taunting him for a while and placed it in the middle of the table, inviting everyone to have a (figurative) bash at it along with the warning that if anyone solved it, he would be forced to kill them – game on! Several folks had a bash at it over the course of the day and there were several discussions about Brian’s recent blog post on the same puzzle announcing that he’d finally found a really satisfying and elegant solution that didn’t rely on random bashing and shaking. 
Many tried and I’d like to say that everyone failed, if only to avoid getting blood on the carpets when Oli lost it, however over the course of the day, the puzzle appeared to miraculously solve itself ... I think I was the first one to notice it when I picked it up around lunch time – it was facing away from me as I picked it up and as I turned it around, my brain registered that the ball was in the lower channel and then I watched helplessly as it rolled right back to the start as my brain was too slow in telling my hand to stop picking it up that way ... curious ... I told a couple of unbelievers what had happened and asked who’d solved it to be greeted by a Great Wall of silence – presumably Oli’s promise of blood was too much of a deterrent. 

A couple more times that afternoon others noticed the same thing though, and in the end it turned up solved three times, mysteriously, among a crowd of people who all professed not to be able to solve it. (Not quite true – Ali had solved it, but promised he hadn’t been party to the miraculous auto-solving Alles Roger phenomenon of MPP4.) I wonder if we’ll ever know what really happened that day ... No puzzlers were harmed in the making of this story, although we believe the threats were real. 

During the course of the day, Oli separated himself from the mad(dening?) crowd and had a go on Eric Fuller’s Triple Locked Box - and he actually solved the thing! There was virtually no nudging or hinting, he found the doo-hickey on his own (serious achievement!!) and then opened it – tremendous effort Oli!

Most of the Popplocks got trotted out for a play and they all managed to raise a smile as usual – and I expect that Russ is off to scour the inter-web to try and track down a T4 for himself, so if anyone knows of one looking for a new home... 

The puzzling slowed down a little bit over pizzas at lunchtime, although Chris Pitt was chatting animatedly about his puzzles while people passed around his tiny handmade version of a blue Revomaze – that little puzzle is a fully functional version of its significantly bigger brother, machined by hand in brass – phenomenal. If he’d had a spring assembly available I know several people who’d have taken that puppy for a test-drive ... and several people did have a go on his first prototype Revomaze in all its shiny, raw, handmade goodness. 

Later on in the day, Jez hauled out his iPad and showed us a great little puzzle app he’d found called Cross Fingers – a few of us had a go and quite liked the puzzles and found the gameplay to be pretty slick – I downloaded a copy this morning ... just to fill the time while we all wait for the next episodes of Cut the Rope and Angry Birds, you understand. 

One or two people were brave enough to have a go at Gregory Benedetti’s Stand Py Me  - with Chris spending quite a while coming up with a number of solutions that had spare pieces left over or a not-quite-symmetrical assembly in the frame – he got it in the end though...

Roger’s Gartenschlauch and Feuerzueg defeated all comers however ... the former being totally undefeated among our number and the latter falling to only two puzzlers in our merry little band so far – I think... 

The Kosticks’ Sixteen Axis magnetic artwork seemed to put a smile on everyone’s face that played with it, while Shaun’s Karakuri Little Tree box caused plenty of amusement as several hardened puzzlers “solved” it rather agriculturally without realising what they had really done or how the mechanism worked – although in fairness it was a bit loose. Chris’ Confetto and Mini Cubi’s were really big hits as well... 

The 4-Steps Visible Lock was a reasonably popular puzzle on the day with just one grumpy old so-and-so reckoning he was a bit disappointed with it – chiefly because it only has 4 steps – after all, we all know that really good puzzles have at least 320 steps more than that ... :-)

 

Several people managed to go home with some shiny new puzzles – half our order of Makishi boxes had arrived a couple of weeks ago so I was able to dish out a few of those as well as pass on some rather more collectible pieces to Chris and Ali - I got a HUGE kick out of being able to source a couple of Stickman boxes for them – not sure I’ll ever be able to do that for someone again, but that was pretty cool! Big thank you to Chris who delivered my rather handsome Daedalus courtesy of Gregory “rotations are required” Benedetti ... after spending the best part of an hour and a half on it this afternoon, I know exactly how he earned that middle name! 

Despite my best attempts, the Box o’ Bounty actually seems to have grown this meeting – even though several people did help themselves to something from the box, more people tossed puzzles into the box – hey, ho – I’ll try harder next time...

Thanks to everyone who came along and made the day so much fun – thanks Ali for bringing some grub and thanks guys for the wine and choccies. 

In the words of that great philosopher Wallace, “That were a cracking day out, Gromit!”

Kosticks’ Geometric Works of Art

...Something special...

 

I stumbled across John and Jane Kostick’s website by accident while I was reading Gabriel Fernandes’ Tetraxis toy blog post. The Tetraxis toy looked like an interesting little novelty puzzle using some of the same sort of geometry that makes a lot of Stewart Coffin’s designs so challenging – at the end of the blog post there’s a pointer to some of the Kosticks’ other work on their website, so I surfed on over, and came across something beautiful…

Along with their special flavour of cabinetry and furniture, the Kosticks have been quietly making awesome geometrical artwork for decades – John produces intricate interlocking bronze constructions – take a look at his stars over here … and Jane produces geometric masterpieces in wood.  Their web shop sells their Tetraxis “magnetic geometry puzzles” direct and their website hints that the wooden sculptures may be available ... so I sent off an enquiring email asking whether it might be possible to get a wooden version of their Tetraxis puzzle (because I thought they looked absolutely gorgeous!) and received a reply from Jane pretty soon afterwards, full of enthusiasm, saying she’d be happy to make one up - what size, what shape, and what woods did I want? All of which sort of caught me off-guard, because I’m still not really used to crafts(wo)men like this making something up, especially for me – I was expecting to be offered something from a list of stock she had around at the moment ... I managed to get over all that and settled on a four inch set of sixteen axis sticks in a combination of maple, cherry and purpleheart. A few days later Jane offered me a matching sixteen axis silicon bronze star and it didn’t take long to say “What the heck, yes, please!”... I wandered off on my holidays and soon after I got back I had an email from Jane saying the sticks were all done and she’d be shipping them across the pond shortly. They duly arrived on Monday, along with the two plastic Tetraxis toys I’d ordered (‘cos they looked like they’d be fun to fiddle with!). 

Having a pair of the plastic Tetraxis toys means you can experiment with odd shapes and strange constructions or mix and match colours between the two standard shapes – I’m easily amused, I know... but the main attraction in the box was the fully assembled sixteen axis sculpture nestling in the corner – inside a couple of bubble-wrap bags. 

Suffice it to say that it looks a million dollars! The three different woods have all been clearly taken from the same boards - they all match perfectly – and the fit and finish is superb. Each little stick has four individual neodymium magnets placed in exactly the right spot to automagically align the structures properly as you’re building them.

The sixteen axis sculpture is made up of three layers:

- a six axis ball made up of thirty wide sticks that leave very small holes at the main intersections of three and five sticks,

- surrounded by a ten axis ball made up of thirty narrow sticks that forms a lattice around the six axis ball’s features,

- with a sixteen axis silicon bronze star deep inside all of that, with only the very tips of the major axes peeking through some of the holes in the six axis ball.

The fit between those three layers is really good as you can see from the close-up, where the shiny ball in the centre is the very tip of the silicon bronze star peeking through from inside, while the outer shell touches all of the vertices of the inner pieces it passes across – and every piece is held securely in place, with a really positive click, by those perfectly placed magnets.

Not only a beautiful piece of art to admire, but a therapeutic toy to fiddle with and experiment on. What might have started out life as a means of teaching geometrical concepts has turned into a lovely puzzling piece of art.

Keep an eye on these folks, 

I suspect you’ll be hearing more from them in the near future ... ;-)

Thanks Jane and John – I love my sculpture – all the best for your future puzzling endeavours!

[Postscript: Tetraxis toys are available from Grand Illusions in the UK.  ]