Air Lock

One of my favourites from an earlier Pelikan release, Air Lock is a classic Goh Pit Khiam design: a simple frame and five straight-forward pieces begging to be placed inside said frame – the only possible hurdle is the rather narrow (two voxel) opening in the frame – that and the clear acrylic that’s stopping you from simply dropping the pieces into the frame.

A simple visual inspection of the pieces is going to show you that not only are rotations required just to get at least one of those pieces into the frame at all, once you get some of the pieces inside the frame, there is very little room to actually do anything useful… there are ample holes in the clear acrylic to allow access to manoeuvre those pieces, there just isn’t an awful lot of spare room!

…so a plan is going to be required.

*

Of course I set out “knowing” where some of the more troublesome pieces would have to go and I duly spent a while trying to make that work… as you might expect, that turned out to be pretty fruitless and I went back to basics and jettisoned all of my “knowledge”.

…that allowed a couple of rather more helpful discoveries, and in due course the discovery of a wonderful solution path that that is an absolute delight. Everything needs to be done in just the right order, or nothing works… I did say it was a classic Goh Pit Khiam design after all. 

 

* No that isn’t the solution – there’s a stray voxel in the opening – that’s not allowed.