Wil Strijbos’ NEW Perrier Puzzle Bottle

Back in October I mentioned that I’d managed to acquire one of Wil’s latest Perrier Puzzle Bottles at the Dutch Cube Day and promised to write about it, so I guess I’d better...  

Wil’s first Perrier Puzzle Bottle had a steel tube fixed into the mouth and a bullet-shaped piece of plastic rod languishing inside the bottle – and it came with the solution inside an envelope. Your job was to get the rod out of the bottle… and there were a couple of ways to do that – mostly involving varying degrees of dexterity – but there was one very elegant solution that even totally uncoordinated people like me will manage…

Wil’s new Perrier Puzzle Bottle has a steel tube fixed into the mouth and a bullet-shaped plastic rod languishing inside the bottle … only this time there’s no envelope with the solution provided (by the way, don’t get your hopes up – that solution was a slip of paper with the word “Solution” typed on it! Wil hasn’t gone soft…) and there’s a cap over the mouth of the bottle. 

So far so good – sounds like a simple variation on the first version… until you think about it – sure, the alternative solutions requiring a bit of dexterity will probably work on this version (and indeed James Dalgety has proved that to his own satisfaction) – but the elegant solution (let’s call it that) can’t be the same…

 

Right – first things first, unless there’s a cunning trapdoor hidden somewhere in the bottle itself, if we can’t remove the cap from the bottle, we aren’t going anywhere … thankfully the cap turns out to have a reasonably snug press-fit, but it can be removed using just your fingers. Setting the cap to one side I start to work out a plan of attack … that little rod inside the bottle will stand upright on the base, but there’s just enough of a gap between the bottom of the tube and the top of the rod that unless you have excellent dexterity, almost every attempt to get it out through the tube will fail … or at least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it! (I couldn’t get the old-fashioned-toy method to work even once – although James has...) 

After a bit of head scratching and some experimentation I manage to stumble across something I hadn’t expected and then as a grin progressively works its way across my ugly mug I work out what the elegant solution must be, and it works perfectly – and it really is elegant!

Once you’ve freed the rod from the bottle, there’s one more little discovery to go – “A present from Dita” was how I think Wil put it… trust me, it’ll all make sense! (Sorry - but I suspect that the final bit is only in the Dita-version.)

Wil’s new Perrier Puzzle Bottle comes in two flavours – there’s the somewhat limited edition version with the Dita Von Teese branding, and “personalised memorabilia” – limited as Wil was only able to snag a few of these bottles – and a standard version providing exactly the same puzzle but in a standard Perrier-branded bottle. I suspect that the former will all have gone by now, but Wil should still have the standard version available if you drop him a line.

Strijbos cola bottle #9

In the run up to MPP11 Wil had mentioned that he was hoping to have a new cola bottle puzzle for us in the Midlands. Having seen a crate full of rather special aluminium cola bottles in his kitchen a couple of months ago I was hoping that this one would be something a little different, and Wil didn’t disappoint!

Shortly after settling down at my place on the Friday evening, Wil opened his suitcase and produced a very funky looking aluminium cola bottle with a familiar-looking red rod sticking out of the mouth. He said he’d been working on it right up until the night before and had managed to bring just a couple of them along. He explained that these cola bottles were a bit different and since they were made of aluminium, it was a bit harder than usual to see what was going on inside. Strijbos – master of the understatement!

He had however solved that particular problem, he went on to explain, by pointing to the 4mm hole he’d drilled in the side of the bottle as he produced a little glow stick and proceeded to bend it and set it glowing. One end of the glow stick is poked into the hole in the side while you peer into the mouth of the bottle and you can almost see something useful inside there … then he points out that these glow sticks only have a limited life and that with the pair of them he’s given you … one of which he’s helpfully lit up already – you only have about 24 hours to solve the puzzle! 

Gotcha!

Better get started then…

I peer into the green gloom and once you get used to it, you can see a fair amount inside there… only problem is that part of Wil’s mechanism appears to be a plastic washer on the familiar red rod whose only purpose seems to be to hide the business end of the stick from view … unfortunately it’s pretty effective at exactly that! 

Down in the bottom of the bottle the familiar jangle of a grey marble provides some familiarity, but not a lot of help ... a fair amount of experimentation and manoeuvring reveals not an awful lot to me so I hand it over to Louis and he jangles things about for a while - noticing more than I've managed to, but not managing to make significant progress before we retire for the night, leaving the little green light glowing in the dark while we recharge for a full day's puzzling. 

The bottle goes along to MPP11 ... along with two other copies but it takes all day of various folks making various attempts before Russ manages to open one of them... much to Wil's delight. Seeing the business end of it out in the open helps you realise just how mean Wil's been... working out what's going on in there through a tiny hole in a dark bottle takes a fair amount of imagination - kudos Russ!

Wil talks me through some of the aspects of the design, and shows me how to make it even harder with a simple twist ... he's mean! 

And by the way, reassembly for the next victim is non-trivial too...

The bottle gets reassembled and I get some time to experiment and play some more the next evening and even having seen the mechanism outside the bottle and knowing how it must work, it takes me a little while to come up with a reasonable strategy for reliably opening it ... 

It's a really great new addition to Wil's wonderful range of cola bottle puzzles...  Thanks Wil!

A couple more Cola Bottles

At the Dutch Cube Day I was fortunate to be able to collect a couple of Cola Bottles that Wil Strijbos had made up specially for me ... I’d mentioned that I was missing #5 a little while back after I’d had a go on Nigel’s copy at our last Warwick MPP and Wil had rather kindly offered to make one up for me. Wil had brought a crate of Cola Bottles along to DCD including a couple with names on them and one of those was a #5 for me ... and then hidden away in one of crates – so well hidden in fact that it took the best part of the day to unearth them, he’d also made up a couple of #7Bs ... so I took a copy of that as well.

Wil’s Cola Bottle #5 is easily recognisable as a Strijbos puzzle from the classic red stick and his trademark shiny silver-grey marble rolling around the bottom of the bottle. There’s a vanilla-looking nut and bolt down toward the bottom of the stick and a pair of nuts threaded onto a rod through the red stick toward the throat of the bottle ... and there’s a hex key rattling around in the bottle.

The rod can be pulled out a fair distance, but the marble and the hex key are staying in there for the time being. Now anyone who’s seen one of these puzzles before will automatically be drawn to using one of those little tools to try and unscrew the nut ... because that’s what you always do with these puzzles, right? So you fiddle around a bit and get the nut off expecting the screw to drop out of the rod ... except it doesn’t – it remains determinedly stuck in there, for no apparent reason... time to Think (c). ;-)

Some serious close up inspection will show something that you’ve probably not noticed until now, and then you’ll need to apply the little grey cells to work out how to make use of that, discovering along the way that Wil’s been a bit sneaky about exactly how he’s provided those tools for you – so they aren’t quite as useful as you might prefer. 

It’s a great bottle puzzle and everything is there for a reason – nothing is superfluous – there’s a bit of dexterity involved in getting things positioned just right but I found that this combination of tools actually makes putting it back together again a lot easier than some of the other Cola Bottles. 

...Probably one of my favourites out of Wil’s Cola Bottles...

 

Wil’s Cola Bottle #7B is an extension of Cola Bottle #7 which has a red stick through the middle of the bottle with three padlocks locked onto the stick – one inside and one either side of the bottle. There are keys dangling from each lock, but the outside keys will unlock the inside padlock and vice verse. Cola Bottle #7B extends this to two Cola Bottles joined by a single red stick with four padlocks: one inside each bottle and one either side of the pair of bottles ... and again the keys are all in the wrong places to be useful.  

This one’s a bit fiddly, but the required manoeuvres aren’t too tricky. You might need a little trial and error to work out which outside keys open which inside locks, but you’re only ever going to have to go through the process once too many if you’re unlucky. 

Definitely not the trickiest of Wil’s Cola Bottles, but it certainly has good presence on the puzzle shelf. 

Thanks for making up a #5 for me and for letting me take one of the #7Bs off your hands Wil ... my Strijbos Originals puzzle shelf is beginning to get a bit full now! :-) 

 


POSTSCRIPT: just after I took that photograph, I was in the kitchen reassembling puzzles for their closed pictures and I managed to drop the rod on the floor... and it sadly ended up breaking at one of the weak spots. So I confessed in an email to Wil and asked if he could please make up another one for me in between all of his travelling - and then a couple of weeks later, I had a message back from him to say he'd popped another rod in with my latest order - but that he'd forgotten the holes, so would I please keep the holes from the previous rod and use them on this one...(!)

The rod duly arrived, sans holes indeed, so I transferred the ones off the old rod and everything is all back together again once more. Thanks Wil. 

Strijbos cola bottle #8 – aka The IPP32 Commemorative Bottle

A couple of weeks ago I had a really amusing email from Wil saying he’d been travelling around the Netherlands and was having lunch when he’d suddenly had an idea for a new cola bottle puzzle – one that celebrated IPP32 , and he had called it cola bottle #7 … which confused the heck out of me because a couple of days earlier I’d read a review of Wil’s cola bottle #7 on Jeff’s blog … and I recognised it as one of the bottles I have on my shelf already. Confused, I traded a couple of emails with Wil that resulted in him admitting that there had already been a cola bottle #7, but this one ‘needed’ to be cola bottle #7 even if it happened to be the eighth one in the series … sometimes Wil can be a little enigmatic, so I left it at that…

A few days later, he was posting me a few other things and he knew that we were heading for another Midlands Puzzle Party so he added a cola bottle #7 / 8 to the package and asked me to take it along to the MPP for folks to play with…

When the package arrived, I had a jolly good laugh as I opened it and found the cola bottle in question – it is most definitely a new Strijbos cola bottle! 

Technically, it should be cola bottle #8, but there are 7 things inside it… 

Back in the posts about IPP32 I told the story about Wil catching me (and one or two others) out with a variant of my Peppermint Twist puzzle … turns out there have been several variants with an increasing number of strands in them, but High Five was the one that caught me hook, line and sinker! 

…and staring at me from inside this new cola bottle was a pen from the IPP hotel, a marble and an assembled copy of High Five! I literally laughed out loud when I first saw that…

It went down pretty well at MPP7 a couple of days later, although several folks were a bit tentative when it came to trying to extract the High Five, as it won’t come out in the assembled position… and the thought of having to reassemble it inside the bottle was a bridge too far for some… 

Chris’ dad had no such qualms and waded in, and out again – quite successfully, and to be honest I took a fair amount of courage from his success … it is a bit fiddly, and strangely some of the things that you wouldn’t think would be fiddly, are … like just getting the first thing out of the bottle … everything tends to want to come out at the same time, and as a result they tend to jam one another in the neck and stop anything from coming out … but once you get something out, it makes getting the others out a lot easier… of course it won’t be nearly as easy getting things back together again inside the bottle… and I’ll leave the interested reader to work on that… 

... and if you decide that you want to have one of your own to experiment on, drop Wil a note – he doesn't have any of the IPP hotel pens left, but I’m sure he’ll be able to find a suitable substitute!

…even without the back-story and the in-jokes, it’s a cracking puzzle! With them, it’s irresistible… 

Thanks Wil!

Strijbos cola bottles - a quick summary
After all of our confusion over the naming of Wil's cola bottles, he sent out a plea for help to "those that know" and it was duly answered by John Rausch and between them they produced the following pic and a brief summary of the generally available Cola Bottles - be warned there have been several specials and one-offs just to confuse things ... so here you are for anyone who's interested: 

The (current) Complete(?!) list of Wil Strijbos cola bottle puzzles:

• Cola Bottle #1   Red Stick with Nut and Bolt
• Cola Bottle #2   Black Stick with 2 Nuts - different solution to #1
• Cola Bottle #3   Red Stick with Lock and key ring
• Cola Bottle #4   Chain with Lock - no marble
• Cola Bottle #4B Chain with Lock and short black stick
• Cola Bottle #5   Red stick with Bolt and screw somewhere in the middle and a tool
• Cola Bottle #6  was a one-off made for a friend. Some of those ideas appeared in a subsequent pair of Whiskey Bottles that are still available.]
• Cola Bottle #7 –  3 Locks suspended from a red rod through the Bottle - no marble 
• Cola Bottle #7B 4 locks suspended from a red rod spanning two bottles - aim is to release the plastic washer on the rod between the bottles
• Cola Bottle #8 –  The IPP32 Commemorative Bottle - in two flavours: one with the IPP hotel pen, others with "something else"

Strijbos cola bottle family - photo courtesy John Rausch

The information came with the usual health warning from Wil: not all of these bottles are always available ... so if you're trying to complete a collection of them, you may need some patience.