Pair Dance

[Forgive me blogfather for I have not blogged for 10 days ...  

I'll be in the corner doing my Hail Coffins.]

Eric’s latest releases at Cubic Dissection included a real little gem from Osanori Yamamoto called Pair Dance. They were available in a choice of woods and mine has a jatoba frame and a pair of purpleheart burr pieces. 

It arrives assembled and the first thing you’ll notice is that the tolerances are incredible! When I started playing with it those pieces were very snug and needed to be kept cleanly aligned to enable them to move. While I was idly fiddling around I noticed that in a few of the configurations, you could rotate one or both of the pieces inside the frame, and thinking I was onto something useful, I spent a while exploring what turned out to be an unnecessary diversion. 

There is a relatively clear series of moves required to get to a place where you can start making good progress toward getting the pieces out of the frame. From there it’s a reasonably straight-forward process of doing what you can, making some adjustments and then doing what you can again until the first piece is freed. 

 

Putting them back in is a bit more of a challenge, although having a symmetrical frame does help reduce the combinations. Even though it’s a level 14 puzzle, it’s reasonably accessible, even for non-burrphiles like myself!

It’s a fun puzzle to fiddle with and I often find myself grabbing it from beside the PC and playing around absent-mindedly with it while I’m engrossed in something useful, or watching videos of cute puppies on YouTube. 

[Oh, and rotations aren't required!]