Thanks Oli!

A couple of months ago my mate Oli (yip, the one we blame for almost everything) began experimenting with impossible folded playing cards … he posted pics of his experiments on FaceBook and they were generally rather well-received, attracting praise and encouragement from none other than the god-father of such things (yip, the one I blamed for the earbud cube … and I guess I should blame him for the next one as well!). Soon enough Angus was taunting Oli with pics of his new designs and Oli was eagerly stepping up to the plate and coming up with his own versions of them… 

Not content with merely making impossible playing cards, Oli then set about putting those impossible playing cards into bottles, and indeed displaying them inside said-bottles in various impossible manners… like with bolts through them, hanging from chains, secured by tightened nuts… 

Soon the awful people of internet-land began goading him into further impossibleness so he placed several twisty puzzles inside bottles with throats too narrow to allow them out (sensible use of a twisty puzzle in my books!).  

Then someone challenged him to put a miniature artist’s posable mannequin inside a bottle and that looked pretty impressive, but when you find out how the limbs are connected (springs stretch through each limb) you feel like bowing down in awe… 

...then there was a large 6-piece burr in the bottle, but he didn’t like how the key piece flopped around so he bolted it to the next piece with a tightened nut on the end of the bolt… 

OK, so he’s graduated First Class from the University of That’s Not Blimming Possible and he’s doing things that he really shouldn’t be dreaming of…

Now back when he started playing around with impossibility, he offered to make me an impossible bottle as a gift … and when I ran into him at Peter’s place just after New Year he had brought along an entire crate of impossibleness, some to give away and some for sale – several to chat about. 

He’d also made up a slew of impossibly linked cards that he proceeded to give to all comers, and soon enough he’d presented me with an impossibly braided strap and a mini 3*3*3 in a tiny mason jar, told me to take my pick of the bottles and only allowed me to give him a nominal payment when I took his bolted-burr-and-impossible-coaster-card-in-a-bottle from him as well… 

…and that’s how I ended up with a haul of Oli’s impossibility – including a Royal Flush, most of it bolted and suspended from a chain inside a bottle, secured by a Monkey’s Fist knot or two – Just Brilliant! 

Thanks Oli!

It’s all Angus’ fault

[You’re off the hook this time Oli!]

Back at the end of November Angus Lavery posted a pic of his latest impossible object – an earbud cube…

Now having had a limited amount of success with some matchstick cubes a little while back I decided to have a bash at making an earbud cube as well … I reckoned that it should be a bit easier than the matchstick cubes in at least one sense – there were thicker bits at both ends and I reckoned that would probably help with getting the right degree of tension set up in there…

So I duly added a few boxes of earbuds to my next shop at Sainsburys (Yes, I got some very strange looks!) and set about having a go at producing one just before Christmas. 

The ground-rules for these objects are simple – you only get to use the objects themselves in the final construction – no glue or threads or Blue-Tac – just the earbuds.

Now the earbuds may well have thicker bits at both ends, but they’re rather light little things and you need to be careful not to sneeze or breathe too heavily when you’re working on them… 

I followed more-or-less the same approach as I had for the matchstick cubes but as I was worried about keeping the first layer in place, I used a sacrificial piece of masking tape sticky side up on the desk to keep the first nine buds in place… working my way up to virtually full height didn’t take very long and I found that the buds tended to stay where I wanted them rather nicely – so perhaps the masking tape wasn’t necessary after all. 

When it came to lifting the cube and compressing it I found that getting it off the tape was quite a delicate procedure, especially while you’re handling around a hundred odd earbuds loosely assembled into a cube, trying desperately not to waste the last hour’s careful stacking and cajoling. If I make another I suspect I’ll pass on the masking tape…

Building the structure outwards once it’s been properly compressed a couple of times was pretty straight-forward and the structure turns out to be quite forgiving – I found I had a side that wasn’t square so had to effectively remove and replace it in-situ and things help up fine… 

Filling in the sides once the outlines of the cube were done was pretty therapeutic, knowing that the hard work and the risky bits were effectively all done by then… and the end-result after an hour or so’s fiddling – an earbud cube to go on the shelf next to the matchstick cubes from a little while back – success! 

…and thanks Angus for posting that pic and reminding me to have a bash at making one! 

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On a related theme … I got to meet Sándor Bozóki at IPP34 -  Sándor is one of the leading lights when it comes to matchstick cubes and the like – he not only makes impressive looking matchstick cubes, but he puts them inside bottles as well … and yes, he does them properly! No glue, just matches …

Sándor had a bunch of his pin cubes available for sale at the puzzle party so I picked up two of them… 

Now even though these pin cubes do use adhesive to get them going, they’re still very impressive pieces of patience and engineering … the smaller of the two is made up of 267 11mm pins whilst the larger of the two comprises around 2200 34mm pins … lovely little objects for the shelf of impossibility. 

That’s impossible!!

I give you the first impossible object that I’ve added to my collection – a pair of playing cards from Angus Lavery ... and a little story behind them. 

Back at Easter, down in Devon, at James Dalgety’s Easter Puzzle Party, I met an interesting fellow by the name of John Lavery. John is the current organiser of the monthly gatherings of puzzlers and magicians at Camden Lock (2nd Tuesday of the month – shout if you want the details!) since Ray Bathke stepped down after organising them for several years. I’d seen his name on the regular emails, but since I haven’t managed to get down to one of the Camden Lock do’s yet, I hadn’t actually met him. 

My introduction to John came as he was showing a couple of us an album he’d put together to showcase brother Angus’ incredible card-folding skills ... he was flicking through the album and taking the odd card out and passing them around for closer inspection while he was telling stories about the designs: Angus came up with this one in about fifteen minutes after Christmas dinner one year – he disappeared into the kitchen and came out with this – as he held up a complicated set of about five interconnected cards, each with its own impossible fold, yet somehow appearing rather solidly interlinked with the others.  

 

Some would be dismissed with a comment about the particular design losing quite a lot of material, so they don’t look as impressive – and others would have something rather subtle about them that needed pointing out – at least to the largely uninitiated, like myself. I’d come across impossible card-folding a couple of times on my trawling around the internet – seen some pictures (mainly trapdoor cards) and had to look at some of them a couple of times before I realised what the impossible bit was (told you I was a philistine!). 

I’d also come across a chapter in one of my puzzle books [Puzzlers Tribute – A Feast for the Mind] on impossible card-folding by Luc de Smet – and it showed how to create one class of impossible card, but apart from that, my research (read: surfing!) has turned up very little else. From what I can gather, the basic rules of impossible card-folding are: cutting and folding is allowed – rejoining anything isn’t, so if it looks like it’s joined, it always has been...

Anyway, back to John’s tour through Angus’ body of work – and there’s one card in there that is totally mind-blowing: a standard sized playing card with the Olympic Rings cut and folded so that each ring is half cut-out and half folded-over card – except that all five rings are interlinked wherever they overlap! Remember the rules? No rejoining, ever ... John told us that this is one of Angus' harder designs and it has a non-trivial failure rate – and looking at just how little material is left to keep the two halves of the rings together, and trying to imagine the amount of folding and turning inside out that these cards have to go through to get those rings interlinked – that’s hardly surprising! 

 

A couple of days later I got in touch with Angus and asked if there was any chance he’d be prepared to make up a couple for me as “Thank-you”s for a pair of puzzlers who’ve been rather kind to me, and who already have every-puzzling-thing that I could imagine trying to give them – and I was very chuffed (and quite a bit surprised – after all he didn’t know me from Adam and I was expecting a reaction more along the lines of “I’d rather stick pins in my eye than go through that again”) when he agreed ... and a few weeks later I received a well-packaged set of little picture frames from Angus: three of his incredible Olympic Ring cards and a copy of his very first impossible card design.

I’ve sat and stared at these cards for ages, and I reckon I’m no closer to understanding how the heck they work than when I first saw one in John’s album at Easter – truly impossible objects – courtesy of Angus Lavery’s incredible card-folding wizardry!

[Oh, and in case you’re wondering – they loved them! Thanks Angus!  :-) ] 

Postscript: my mate Oli has had a go at playing around with creating some of his own - have a look over here! Nice one Oli!!