Another mini masterpiece

Almost eight years ago now (yikes!) Jack Krijnen made a gorgeous little Level 5 burr set that I raved about over here. Five years ago he produced his version of the Ultimate Burr set, and yes, I raved about that one too. This year Jack’s gone even further out on a limb and produced The Phoenix Family Burr Set – and yes, I’m going to rave about this one too!

The Phoenix Family comes in a gorgeous little walnut box, this time complete with an inlay of a phoenix rising from the flames. Inside the box you’ll find 45(!) burr pieces with their neat little tweezers for grabbing the pieces you want without having to tip them all out on the table) along with a set of cards covering the family history and laying out the pieces required for assembling a number of 18-piece burrs… yes, this is the first burr set designed specifically for 18-piece burrs. 

The cards explain that the genesis of a large number of the 18-piece burrs we know today, including Supernova, Tiros and Burrly Sane for Extreme Puzzlers, can be traced back to an original 2008 design from Alfons Eyckmans called Phoenix. Alfons and Jack developed the ideas in Phoenix to produce a significant number of 18-piece burr designs over the years, and now Jack has put together a burr set to allow the truly masochistic puzzlist to experiment themselves and explore the differences between Tiros and Barones all in the palm of their hands. The cards give the piece sets required for 12 high level burrs, starting from one requiring 134 moves (so trivial it hasn’t even been named!) right up to the 166-move Supernova. If you ask Jack nicely (of course I did!) he’ll also send you a handy BurrTools file that will let you explore all the possible assemblies with this set… and give you a handy assembly guide (‘cos there’s no way in heck I could assemble any of those without using BurrTools!).

Assembling any 18-piece burr always starts out like an exercise in dexterity – at least until you’ve got enough woodwork in place to start getting things to hold together on their own… and the joy of Jack’s little burr sets is that the pieces are small enough that you can easily support quite of few of them in odd positions while you’re starting out the first ten or so pieces – don’t get me wrong, you’re still going to need a bit of dexterity, but at least the weight of the pieces isn’t also playing against you!

Jack’s given you enough pieces in each colour so that when you’re constructing the main puzzles, you’re always going to have matching woods in each plane. Neat, eh? The pieces all have their identifiers laser-engraved on their ends so you can spot them easily in the box - a lot of thought has going into the selection and design, and a huge amount of care has gone into crafting this wonderful little set of monsters. 

It’s hard not to be impressed with The Phoenix Family! – Thank you for providing another inspiring little burr set, Jack!

Unusual stuff from Eric...

Eric Fuller has found some rather unusual looking puzzles to make recently – you can read about his Chicken on Jerry’s blog over here, and Kevin’s over here… no sense me telling you about it as well…

There have been a few other rather unusual and intriguing offerings that don’t look like poultry, take Tom Jolly’s Bundle of Sticks for instance… made to look like a – you guessed it – bundle of sticks. This assembly / disassembly puzzle consists of four sticks with some rather well-placed protrusions (thorns perhaps?) that interfere with the ring that holds the bundle together. 

When you start this puzzle those thorns are arranged in a neat semi-symmetrical pattern around the sticks with the ring smack bang in the centre. 

Removing the first piece is not a challenge – it’s a key-piece and simply slides out under the force of gravity… removing the next piece is far more interesting!  That takes 13 moves… and even removing the second last piece takes another six moves. 

With the simple ring around the centre all of the pieces are pretty much in view all of the time, so you can plan a route to get things out of the way. A couple of the pieces have caps on their ends which cuts down on the possibilities for movement in a few of the orientations, but even still, working out how to align the pieces in order to make progress isn’t a horrible challenge in spite of the puzzle’s level. 

There are one or two potential dead-ends, but they don’t trap you for long…

 

I really enjoyed this puzzle – it’s a great design from Tom and Eric’s done a lovely job of bringing it to life in holly and wenge, so it looks brilliant! […and rather unusually, as I’m writing this, there are still five copies available for sale!]

Next up is a variant on a puzzle that has a lot to do with why I really enjoy collecting mechanical puzzles: Matchbox Play Six is a variant of Oskar’s Matchboxes – the topic of my 6^th blog post (this by contrast will be my 377^th post...) and one of the puzzles I blame for my thoroughly irrational love of beautifully handcrafted puzzles. 

While Oskar’s design has 5 interlocking matchboxes and can be a fairly tricky puzzle, Olexandre Kapkan’s version has six matchboxes that separate naturally into three mirrored pairs. Eric’s created them in a bunch of different exotic woods and calling it a beautiful puzzle does not do it justice. It is gorgeous!

It is great fun to experiment with and even muggins has managed to find a few solutions on this variant – from pretty compact to a big loop – a very cute variant on a classic Oskar puzzle… and it looks brilliant next to the original version!

Last puzzle for today is Uri Three Bars designed by Dario Uri. Eric’s made these with wenge legs and maple caps – a nice contrast. The object is to intertwine the three pieces so that they meet with the three caps all together…which would be simple if there weren’t bumps and grooves on the legs along the way. 

Those bumps and grooves mean that sliding any pair together so that the caps meet is reasonably easy with a little manoeuvring – but introducing the third piece requires some backtracking … if you’ve chosen the right two to start with… if you haven’t, no amount of manoeuvring will help you. 

Eric shipped these puzzles disassembled, probably just to avoid damage, not to make it harder for puzzlers.  No, I’m sure he didn’t… (nope, I’m not convinced either!). 

After a little fiddling around I thought about putting the pieces into BurrTools for some, ahem, assistance… only to realise that without know where the bumps and grooves would be on the solved puzzle, I was going to have to use a lot of variable voxels and it might actually end up taking longer than solving it by hand… so I went down the manual route… and delighted myself by solving it without having to spend absolute hours on it. 

 

I probably got a little lucky, because finding which two pieces to start with and then when to introduce the third piece (that’s a long way from obvious!) didn’t take too long… and finding the path through to getting all the caps together was a great reward.

Having solved it, I put the completed puzzle into BurrTools and lo and behold, there is a unique 11-move solution… and knowing from Eric’s website that it’s a level 10 puzzle, you can deduce that introducing the third piece happens pretty early on in the process!

Really unusual-looking puzzle that’s definitely accessible to non-burristas like meself. :-)

Visible Burrs

('cos invisible ones are hard to photograph) 

The universe has a strange sense of timing…

A while ago I managed to snag a single item off Nick’s auction – a copy of Bill Cutler’s Visible Burr. It had been made by Brian Young as a Limited Edition back in 2005 when he produced 30 copies. 

Now it’s fair to say that I hadn’t been paying particularly close attention to the listed dimensions on the auction listing so I was a bit surprised when it arrived … it is large! And very Mr Puzzle-y – the woods instantly give Brian away, and the finishing at the end of the pieces should probably be a Mr P trademark by now… and if there was any doubt at all, he’s branded it with his logo.

Right, so said puzzle has been staring at me from atop my cabinet for a few months now as I haven’t had much time to play with puzzles recently… guilt growing by the day. 

…then a couple of weeks ago Eric Fuller announces a new set of puzzles available for sale, and one of them is none other than Cutler’s Visible Burr, and I can’t stop myself from ordering one, so soon enough I have a second copy mocking me while I’m not puzzling… this one’s disassembled as Eric was charging an assembly fee for this one (and having now played with them, I know why!). 

Seeing as how is was a long weekend I decided to give myself a day off to play with puzzles, so I ended up spending the best part of the day assembling and disassembling a pair of Visible burrs… and it was great!

Let’s start at the big end – Bill Cutler designed Visible Burr to be a disassembly challenge and deliberately made all of the notches in the sticks visible, even when it’s fully assembled – so by inspection, you should be able to deduce how to dismantle this 24-piece monster.  You effectively have a 12-piece burr trapped inside a 12-piece cage, so examination of the inner burr will show you which pieces can move where…

…and at this point you might notice something interesting – there’s a lot of sticks that can move at most points in the solution – only some of them are useful! You will find yourself wandering down a lot of blind alleyways if you don’t examine carefully and think a few moves ahead. (Or you can just play, experiment and fiddle around if you don’t mind going backwards and forwards a bit – which is my preferred approach!)

The first piece needs 7 moves to release it, with the next following along after another couple of moves. Release a few of the inner pieces and you’ll find you can start removing cage pieces too … and then carnage prevails as pieces start flying off left, right and centre. (I have a vivid imagination, stay with me!)

Keep on going and I have a large pile of large sticks. Yay. (What the hell did you do that for?!)

OK, now we pick up the smaller sticks form Eric and set about building that into the same sort of structure… now the three type of wood really help things, as does the fact that the frame pieces are all identical – which means the only real challenge is the 12 internal pieces – the rest is just about timing, timing and dexterity – did I mention you’re wrangling 24 pieces?

Now at this point, dear reader, I shall not insult either your intelligence or my imagination by suggesting that I put it back together unaided – I fired up my trusty copy of BurrTools and spent many pleasurable hours building a suitable model of the monster… so I now know that the complete model consists of 7868 voxels(!) – think about that before you chastise me for using software – that was a labour of love! 

BurrTools found a suitable solution in mere seconds, but it took a lot longer than that to actually build up a copy in the real world… oh and then there was the reassembly of the big bugger as well.

So I started the day with an assembled giant copy and a small set of sticks, halfway through my day I had a large pile of sticks and a small Visible Burr, and at the end of the day, I now have a reassembled monster on top of my cabinet looking down on my with grudging respect and a neat little copy in the cabinet on the Fuller shelf… a good day’s puzzling all round!