Diamond Box

Kagen Shaefer has been known in the puzzling community for quite a while as someone who creates puzzles with the most incredible finishes. A quick glance through his website brings up some gorgeous puzzle boxes going back a few years as well as a few rather puzzling bits of furniture more recently – including an absolutely epic desk that will only release its secrets when the right tune is played on the drawers along the top (the desk conceals an all-wooden pipe organ and a programmable (!) pneumatic logic board that tests the notes). 

Locked...

Earlier this year Kagen’s website announced that he’d be making a run of Diamond Boxes and after seeing a special version sold on the Puzzle Paradise Australian Relief auction earlier this year, I joined the queue for one. Two versions were going to be made and I opted for the budget version in Maple, foregoing the Lignum Vitae option. 

A few months later the rather well packaged little beauty arrived in Barnt Green, whereupon Gill promptly intercepted it and hid it for two days until my birthday, making for a great surprise as I hadn’t realised it had arrived. 

First impressions are that this is a really solid box and the finish is every bit as impressive as you might expect from Kagen’s reputation. Kagen describes the finish as one popular with makers of fine musical instruments and from the feel and sheen on the wood it’s hard to disagree. It really catches the light beautifully and seems alive – especially that curly maple on the base of the box. 

...and unlocked.

The main feature of the box is the set of four triangular walnut plates on the top that frame a black diamond in the centre when it’s locked. A little manipulation magically changes the colour of the diamond from black to pink – even after you’ve done this a hundred times, it still looks magical. Kagen’s got the timing and the tolerances absolutely perfect on that switch from the Gabon Ebony across to the Pink Ivory wooden plate. 

Once unlocked, the box opens in a fairly traditional manner revealing a pretty generous interior. All of the mechanics are neatly hidden away inside the beautifully finished lid that looks remarkably thin given the mechanics it hides. It’s all beautifully finished, even on the inside – with ebony slip feathers strengthening each of the corners. Kagen’s trademark branding, numbering and dating make a neat little feature of an integral part of the mechanism on the lid – neat touch. 

While it’s not a particularly challenging puzzle box, it is an object of real beauty created by a craftsman who’s clearly on top of his game. Quite glad to have been able to add this one to the collection... 

 

[There is a second little secret compartment that I haven’t mentioned – it’s not that hard to find, but it’s a neat little addition that might pass some folks by because they think they’ve solved everything already and stop looking ... and there’s probably a lesson in there... ]

DIY Chopstick Box

A few months ago I bored you with a tale of buying up a strange lot of Stickman paraphernalia from the Australian Disaster Relief puzzle auction held at Puzzle Paradise.  At the time I was trying to make a point about the kindness of puzzlers – you can be the judge of whether I succeeded or not. 

This post carries on where that one left off ... but first, let’s recap a bit: the auction lot contained some sundry Stickman bits and pieces that John Devost had lying around (as one does, apparently!). There was a signed copy of Robert’s book, a pair of Stickman running gloves (you need gloves for running?!) an unnamed box (that I’ll be able to write about some time in the future...) and most of the bits to assemble a Chopstick Box, including a few prototype chopsticks. 

Robert had lined John up to design and make the chopsticks for these boxes and had shipped him a partially assembled Chopstick Box to use as a prototype. [Yes, there’s a fair amount of ‘interaction’ between box and chopsticks, so that’s important!] Having produced the required chopsticks, said box was consigned to storage and forgotten about for a while – until John went rooting around for stuff to put up for sale to raise some cash for his mate Dave Cooper who’d been hit by the latest round of flooding in Australia. 

Jump forward a month or so and I’m staring at a pile of pieces of box and three chopsticks – nae clue! 

Several emails backwards and forwards with the Stickman himself and Robert’s explained how the box works, taught me what that thin white wood is (maple veneer, numpty!), established that I need another chopstick (three of the four in the package weren’t ‘gimmicked’) and then sent me not only the required chopstick and an instruction sheet, but also two small sheets of maple veneer (more than enough!).

It takes me a while to work up the courage to do anything to the bits so they stare at me from the shelf next to the PC for quite a while before I suck up enough courage to have a go at cleaning up the various bits and pieces – some of the veneer has come adrift, so I use a single edged blade to strip the rest of it off and scrape off the remains of the glue – rough it up a bit and then glue the veneer to the top and bottom pieces, putting them between two granite tiles on the bench and piling everything heavy I can find in the garage on top of it ... and leave them alone for a few days.  

 
The results don’t look too bad so a little while later I’m taking my trusty Swann & Morton #23 to it in order to slice off the excess veneer and remove it from the channels for the sides to slot into. That doesn’t go too badly although I suspect that using a table saw to do that would probably be a much better idea –although I can’t really justify buying a table saw to assemble this box(!).

From there the sides need a bit of attention – particularly around the fit into those channels on the top and bottom – mainly scraping off traces of glue to make sure that they are properly seated. At this point the box can be assembled and held together with masking tape and a rubber band or two and I spend ages fiddling with the chopsticks – in and out of the box – again and again – seeing them flick into place and then pop out is really cute and puts a fat smile on my face – I realise that I’m going to have to finish this off nicely, but then I chicken out and leave it that way for a couple of months, dreading the act of gluing it together in case I mess it up. (IMHO that would be sacrilege!)

Roll forward to a holiday weekend and I take the bits out and check the fit, work out what needs to be glued where and in which order and, heartened by seeing Neil’s video of Scott Peterson’s glue-up process, I have a go ... glue the sides to the bottom, pushing them firmly into place, spread a tiny bit of glue (an important lesson from Scott in that video!) along the tops and then put the top in place, making sure that everything is carefully aligned and then clamp it in the bench overnight. 

Next morning it actually resembles a box! Take off some of the rough edges with an orbital sander using the finest grit it’s got, then spend a while removing the remaining sanding lines with some insanely fine sandpaper – once it’s all nice and smooth (really smooth!) clean up all the dust and head indoors to apply some Renaissance Wax – and that really brings the wood alive!

Get the chopsticks out and insert the first one and it gets sucked neatly into place, ditto the second. Fat smile re-emerges. Do the first move and the box spits out chopstick number one in a moderately magical manner – remove it and fiddle around a little and then the box presents chopstick number two for removal – lovely ... and I didn’t screw it up! 

On the whole I’m very  chuffed with how it turned out – I know that it’s nowhere near Robert’s standards of finishing and it’s not an official Stickman Chopstick Box, but I love it! Thanks to John for parting with the bits and to Robert for telling me what to do with them(!) and then supplying the essential extras. 

Perpetual Hinge

My third Stickman acquisition was a Perpetual Hinge Box – also off the Australian Relief Puzzle Auction, so the money went to a great cause thanks to the generosity of one R. Yarger who not only donated the box, but also paid for the shipping across the pond.

Perpetual Hinge is a nice sized box with a good, solid feel to it. At first glance, it seems to have four doors hinged on dowels around a central core box. The central box has a couple of interesting disks on the ends that sometimes seem to be able to spin freely and sometimes seem to tighten up or lock up … with not much of a pattern discernible. The core box seems to wiggle up and down a bit inside the 4-door-straitjacket and it’s not immediately obvious what stops it from wiggling sometimes …

So, attack this thing logically, examine all the panels individually, fiddle with the disks and generally play around with it for a while until you notice that one of the panels will slide up or down a bit – A-HA! Gotcha! ... So you explore that for a while and get a few of the other panels sliding around – oddly sometimes they seem to interfere, and sometimes they don’t … so you fiddle some more.

After a while you realise that you’ve worked your way all the way around the box and moved some panels, but basically you’re back where you started, and you realise just why the box is really well named – you can easily put yourself into an infinite loop and wander from one panel to the next moving them up and down indefinitely …

 

… Right, so at this point I put on my specs and engage the brain and start crawling over it with a fine-tooth comb, and start examining the stuff I’ve ‘overlooked’ [more accurately, not paid nearly enough attention to] up to now, and then spot a couple of interesting little features, features that have been so cunningly hidden that Robert deserves a medal! Armed with that little insight, you can now form a more useful strategy and open the first compartment … which leads you to a really interesting discovery of what those disks might just be doing – you can see some really funky things going on in there that still don’t really make sense (or more accurately – they didn’t to me!).

A bit more work opens the next section and shows you the guts of the box – all those weird movements finally make sense and I’m left with an overwhelming sense that if he’d been a nasty man, Robert could have made that mechanism do a bit more and made it a heck of a lot harder to open – thanks for stopping where you did, mate!

It really looks great, but you’re going to have to trust me because the only pictures I’m going to post are going to be of the outside – you need to earn a view of the insides of this beauty!

Try Knot

Stickman no. 17

...is a good, honest puzzle – everything’s out on display from the start: you have a three axis frame (made of yellowheart, wenge and bloodwood) around a leopard- wood box which has a maze inscribed on three sides. The frame has a pin engaged in each of the mazes and the axes interfere such that you need to navigate around all of the mazes in order to get the box to each of two end positions that will allow you to open a couple of drawers.

The different coloured woods used in the frame and the pins really stand out and make it quite a striking puzzle to look at. The reinforcements in the corners of the frame are not only a nice looking touch, but keep the frames nice and rigid, so the travel through the maze is positive and stops any temptation to try and finesse things. 

Try Knot was crafted (“manufactured” just sounds wrong for beautiful pieces like this!) in a batch of 55, and this one is number 9.

Stickman Domino Puzzlebox

Stickman no.16 

This thing is beautiful – incredibly beautiful!

I’ve tried to take some pictures that do it justice and I’ve failed. The detailing on the box itself it brilliant – the Stickman on the one side and Devost logo on the other are executed superbly. The box itself is made of walnut and Monticello and the tiles are made of exotic burl.

As a puzzle, it’s not conceptually that tough: it’s really a sliding tile puzzle, with three layers of tiles, most of which are made up of a set of domino tiles (yes, there’s a full set in there so you can actually play dominoes once you open the box!) and the rest are a number of different shapes to keep things interesting. 

  

Tilting the box generally slides things around until they hit something else and there are quite a few holes that you can poke your fingers through to encourage tiles to move or stop them from moving... it’s fairly clear what the goal is and where you need to move the space to in order to open the box, but some of the odd shapes can seriously hamper that – especially when some of them are hiding in the middle layer or partly obscured by the logos.  

 

It’s a pretty free format puzzle, so reassembly is really up to the puzzler – you can make it as hard or as easy as you like for the next puzzler...

  

This box is number 2 of 25, and was one of only three that used exotic burl for the dominoes – the detailing in the grain really is beautiful...

I knew I was in for a treat...

...when I got a note from Parcelforce asking me to pay some VAT on a parcel from the USA – I’ve been tracking a parcel from the States since the beginning of last week – the result of winning a couple of lots on a puzzle auction over on Puzzle Paradise. 

A couple of weeks earlier John Devost had announced that he was hosting a puzzle auction on Paradise in order to raise money for Dave Cooper, an Aussie puzzle collector and craftsman of note, whose town had been hit by flooding one week and a cyclone the next. Dave’s home and his local community had been badly hit and his puzzling mates from around the world decided to pitch in and help. John set up an auction with all of the proceeds going to Dave and then promptly donated a bunch of absolutely awesome puzzles... several other leading lights in the community followed suit and donated not only their treasured puzzles, but also stumped up for the postage after the auction... in the end there was a really long list of wonderful folks who’d donated to the auction – those guys are all heroes in my books... 

As I said, there were some pretty incredible puzzles available on the auction, and I managed to win four Stickman lots – the parcel I’d been tracking had been some boxes from Robert Yarger’s personal collection, donated to raise funds for Dave.

First thing Saturday morning I trek around to the other side of Birmingham to pick up my parcel...and when I get home I find another parcel on the doorstep (yeah, we don’t have a lot of crime around here!)  - this one’s got the rest of my haul from the auction, this time from John Devost’s collection...

 

I’d joked with one of my puzzle-mates a few months ago about not being ready to grow up yet, and that if I ever managed to acquire any Stickman boxes, I’d be forced to admit that I was probably starting to take this whole puzzle-collecting thing seriously, and that maybe I was growing up after all... (I’ll probably continue to consider myself an enthusiastic amateur though in the light of some of the real collectors out there!).

So yesterday my collection of Stickman boxes went from zero to four and a half in the space of a couple of hours ... the grin didn’t leave my face all day and I spent several hours solving them one at a time so as to spread out the pleasure as much as I could, after all, the chances of being able to do that again any time soon, are probably quite slim ... what a lovely weekend. Thanks Robert and John.