Keyring 2

Visually there are some similarities between the first and second Keyring puzzles from MW Puzzles – they’re both around the same size with a steel tube and a brass ring around them… the first keyring challenged you to remove the trapped key, whereas thing one asks you (politely) to remove the ring - that’s the brass ring, not the split ring as one of my mates suggested cheekily. (The instructions also request no banging…)

There’s one of MW Puzzles’ customary tokens attached to the split ring and it’s not hard to imagine attaching your keys to said split ring and using this as a functional key ring… should anyone need any encouraging to buy a copy.

At the start of the solve the brass ring moves freely on the steel tube, but is stopped at one end by a large hex screw that refuses to budge and in the centre by a pin securing the split ring… beyond that there’s another steel pin that spins happily but won’t budge… at least there’s a potential path to freedom, right?!

At this point there is literally only one thing even vaguely feasible, and doing that yields a couple of potential tools, but not a strong clue for where to go next…

I found something I thought should be useful (I was pretty sure it would be useful in fact!) but then I discovered that exercising that tool didn’t really do much of use… sure I could see things changing, they just didn’t seem to be opening up anything useful for me…

…and here I stuck for a few weeks, picking it up and doing the same things over and over again, sometimes with more force than strictly necessary – always with the same outcome – no further progress…

…until I asked myself an important question, and that unlocked things for me, figuratively and literally.

A great little pocket puzzle… and (unusually) they’re still available as I write this. 

Postscript - it turns out I hadn't actually solved it! I got chatting to Peter about the solve and discovered we'd both opened it different ways and when I tested that with ace-solver-Ali, he told me our "solutions" weren't nearly elegant enough - only he was far more polite than that! So when I got home I fished out my copy and had another go... I tried all the same stuff again and got nowhere, then I had a little Think(c) before I tried something else and BINGO! Now I know I've solved it properly - that is an excellent puzzle!! I'm a very big fan of this one now that I've solved it properly! (Sorry I didn't get it right the first time, Matthew!)