If you’ve ever handled a copy of Lee Krasnow’s Barcode Burr
you will recognise that statement immediately… finding one for sale is the hard
part – handing over the (not-so-insignificant-sum-of) cash is the easy part!
This thing is an exercise in precision engineering and art –
all wrapped up in a glorious binary puzzle…
Designed and perfectly crafted by Lee back in 2004, the
Barcode Burr is, at its heart, a dissection of a cube into six identical pieces…
which is interesting in and of itself as it appears to be a 3*3*3 cube(!) –
look a little closer and you’ll see some diagonal splits across some of the
blocks – so the maths sort of works a bit better…
Each piece has some combination of pins and / or mazes on
them, and each piece interacts with its neighbours’ pins and mazes… enforcing
the following rules:
- A piece may move if the piece immediately before it is extended and all other pieces before it have been pushed back in, and
- A piece may be removed if extended and every piece before it is pushed back in and every piece after it has been removed.
The trick here is you can’t pull the pieces out: you need to push them from the opposite side, which
takes a little getting used to because the pieces expand outwards on the cube’s
main diagonals… finding the first move can be a little tricky – one of those
little triangles will eject a lump of wood in the opposite direction – find the
right one and the first piece extends… orient the cube comfortably in your
hands and start running through the sequence: 1 out, 2 out, 1 in, 3 out, 1 out,
2 in, 1 in, 4 out… and so on… until you reach move 64 where the first piece can
be removed, with a very satisfying click! .... Huzzah!
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It’s a seriously beautiful object made of Eastern Hard Maple
with inset Macassar Ebony stripes – which is where the name comes from…
definitely one of my awesome puzzle finds of the year!
[Blogging on Christmas Day?? Yip – turns out I’m allergic to
Strictly Come Dancing and the Michael Buble Christmas Specials that the rest of the
family love… so I get to do a little bloggin’ without the guilt of not working
on that other project for one day… so Merry Christmas puzzle-people!!]
I fainted,,,,only Stephen Miller has ever attempted making this incredible puzzle, a 3D printed plastic version which is affordable, and it took him 3 years. BTW a ball Barcode burr is not possible, I tried,,,heh heh
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