Popplock T6

Rainer Popp has been making puzzle locks for a good few years now and I’ve been a fan of them ever since I first stumbled across the T2 over at Grand Illusions. To date they’ve generally been machined from solid chunks of brass, making them large, heavy, and sadly, rather expensive. It seems that quite a few people have been onto Rainer and asked him to consider making something a bit smaller and a bit cheaper … and he’s listened, and recently produced the T6. It’s significantly smaller than its predecessors, but does it fit in with the rest of the Popplock family?

To be honest, I was a bit worried that the T6 might not live up to its illustrious predecessors when I ordered it from Grand Illusions. Rainer has done an excellent job of establishing his locks as superbly manufactured, clever puzzles – the worst thing he could do now would be to cheapen that by putting his name to a simple puzzle that hadn’t been all that well made … it turns out that Rainer gets all that, and he’s managed to produce a great puzzle in an affordable package.

The T6 is a medium-sized padlock that comes with a fairly simple-looking key. Inserting and turning the key does not apparently unlock the padlock, however (but it’s always worth a try!). It may be smaller and lighter than its siblings, but the T6 is still a pretty solid little lock, and in common with all of the others in the range, it could certainly be used as a pretty secure lock. 

At first blush, there’s not a lot that you can do with the T6 – the key goes in, turns around, in either direction, and comes out. There’s nothing interesting in the rivets (you know that you’re going to try and move them, admit it!) and although the body and hasp appear to be made up chiefly of a pair of thick steel plates, they won’t budge – pushing and tugging various bits randomly also teaches you absolutely nothing … Hmm, I’m liking this puzzle already!

It takes a pretty beady eye to notice a little clue that Rainer has helpfully left, almost in plain view – and then a little experimentation to establish that it might be interesting … especially when it jolly vanishes! From there it’s a hop, skip and a (rather large) jump through the 6 steps (by my count) required to open the lock – and as with quite a few of its siblings, the final step is really unexpected and more than a little unusual. (i.e. Vintage Rainer Popp!)

It may be smaller, lighter and more affordable than all of the other Popplocks, but it’s well and truly worthy of the family name – a very welcome addition to the line of Popplocks. Great design Rainer!

At least two other renowned puzzle bloggers have written about their experiences with the T6 – you can read about Neil’s perspective here, and Oli’s over here.

Exploding Cube

...while running with the donkeys 

 

I’ve been meaning to pick up one of these little guys for a while now. I first saw them in wood in Grand Illusions (where it’s known as Trisected Cube) and I’d seen a metal Bits and Pieces version on the net, but when one of Wil Strijbos’ regular newsletters said he had some for sale I dived in straight away. 

It’s pretty straight-forward as a puzzle – three similar interlocking pieces intertwined to form a cube – but the charm is all in the way that it does that. It’s a simple, pure coordinated motion puzzle – as you unfold the three pieces at the same time, the cube expands to the point where the pieces separate.

Each piece interlocks with the other two in a beautifully complicated way. The edges join up and mate together in interesting patterns that seem to have only one purpose – to entertain. It’s neatly made and looks great.

[The donkey reference? ... we were in Santorini yesterday ... and walked up the steps to Fira ... ]

Popplock T3

I first came across Rainer Popp’s puzzle locks through Grand Illusions – they looked good and solid and sounded like they made pretty good puzzles ... once I’d bought one of them (a T2), I’ve kind of had to buy each one that Rainer’s made since then, unfortunately I wasn’t one of the lucky folks who managed to get hold of the very first lock Rainer made (T1) – by all accounts a legendary puzzle lock that won’t be made ever again because it was simply too complicated! (If anyone ever needed any more of a reason to want to try and get hold of one after hearing that, then I haven’t heard of it!) 

From what I’ve read, Rainer uses a friend’s machine shop after hours to make his wares, so his production runs will be reasonably modest, however they’re all being precision-made by a bloke who understands not only good puzzles, but also how to craft them from lumps of metal – they’re not only really unusual good-looking locks, but they’re excellent puzzles as well!

So far my collection of Popplocks runs from T2 to T5 – each one is totally unique both in terms of mechanism and in terms of looks – and this one, T3, is my favourite.  It’s a simple puzzle that stands on its own and will hold its own against most comers.  

It looks a little unusual for a padlock, not least because it doesn’t appear to have a key or a slot for one – it does have a disk shaped piece in the middle of the lock that you can push, pull and rotate, sometimes ... the hasp seems to be a very solid chunk of steel that projects through one side of the lock itself – with a small locking bar along the bottom to (presumably) stop it from coming all the way out when the lock is opened ... so far so good ...

Right, so start playing around with it and work out why sometimes you can turn that dial, and sometimes you can’t, and what that means to you – then enjoy the brick wall that Rainer throws at you for quite some time until you notice something so subtle it’s almost criminal! 

Remember I said that these things were precision- made? That little step in there is just so well disguised that it’ll keep most puzzlers locked out for days ... release the doo-hickey and the lock Popps open :-) – in total there are probably only two or three real ‘moves’ to opening a T3, but I guarantee it’ll amuse you for quite some time trying to find what you need to do ... masterfully hidden, clever design, lovely puzzle!
 

[ ...and in answer to Kevin's question, 

albeit three weeks later,         

yes it does clean up... :-)  ]

Schleussel

Roger D is an enigmatic German (?) manufacturer and creator of a number of unique, instantly recognisable puzzles. They only ever appear in small quantities and the usual shops tend to sporadically have a few of them in stock and sell out fairly quickly. When they appear on auctions they’re invariably hunted down while their prices are chased up by collectors wanting to add to their hoards.

Roger is by all accounts a bit of a mystery, even to some of those who sell his products, with several of them dealing through middlemen who refuse to allow any direct contact with the man himself. One anecdotal story involves a series of communications backwards and forwards through a middleman about a particularly nice puzzle, enquiring about possibly stocking it regularly, pricing and such, until the vendor asked for about thirty puzzles to stock-up, at which point all communications ceased … moral of the story: if you like Roger puzzles, and you can find one or two, buy them! There’s no telling when you’re likely to find them available again.

A huge part of their charm is that they don’t come with any instructions – or solutions, so the first challenge is usually working out what the object of the puzzle is, and sometimes that’s far from obvious.

Schleussel was the first Roger D puzzle I stumbled across – at the time I didn’t even realise it was a Roger – I just bought it from Grand Illusions as a fun puzzle lock. I’ve done a lot of surfing, err, research, since then so I’d like to think that I’m more likely to recognise a Roger puzzle these days, FWIW.

Schleussel, or ‘Key’ if you’re Anglo-ish is a pretty simple looking lock and key, so your first assumption is (OK mine was!) it’s some form of puzzle lock, put the key in the lock and turn (‘cos that’s what you do when faced with a lock and a key, isn’t it?) – things go well at first, it turns almost a full turn before stopping … OK, so what’s the next thing you do? Turn it back, yeah? … right about now, you realise that Roger’s backed you into a corner and you’re stuck there – damn key won’t budge – so now you know, the puzzle isn’t putting the key in, that’s easy, it’s not turning the key, that’s also easy, it’s getting the damn key back out again – ‘cos it’s stuck in there now!

A bit of fiddling will generally get it back a bit, but as with good puzzles, one slip up and you’re back to the start again – except that in this case, the start has the key firmly locked in place at the extreme of its travel. Not helpful … but nice for a puzzle!

Without giving too much away, my first solution wasn’t particularly elegant, but it worked, was repeatable and didn’t take very long – but it looked like a kludge … several months later I was thinking about the mechanism and wondered to myself if there might be a far more elegant solution, and indeed there is:  it opens in seconds, every time, with one smooth movement … now I think I’ve solved it properly.

The best puzzle lock, ever?

...well don’t take my word for it – here’s what puzzling legend and collector extraordinaire, Edward Hordern had to say about it: "If I had to give away my entire collection of locks – there must be a hundred or two hundred of them – and keep only three, this recent acquisition would be one of them. As the other two are rather nice antique ones, we need not consider them any further here. To my way of thinking, the new lock is easily the best of the modern padlocks and is called 'DanLock'".

...I remember reading that before I bought my DanLock and thinking “Well, if EH thinks it’s that good, and he’s certainly played with more than a few puzzle locks in his time, it must be pretty special”, so I bought one from Grand Illusions. 

The first time you take it out of the bag, you get the very strong impression that something is very wrong with this picture: you get one good, solid Israeli- made lock and two keys – bit of a problem though since one of the keys is fastened to the locked shackle and the other has been sawn in half... and your mission, should you choose to accept it (and that’s an important choice that some folks dither over for quite some time, especially given how you start this little adventure!) is to open the lock and then return it to the state you found it in.

Good puzzles make you think, a lot. Great puzzles do that, and don’t let you do anything irreversibly harmful. This is a GREAT puzzle – EH was right on the money. 

There are several definite stages in this puzzle, not necessarily in order: “I wish I had a ...”, “You sneaky bas....”; “Ah well, how bad can it be?” and “A-Haaa!” – having worked my way through it, I found myself still wanting to know 

how the heck 

he’d done all that, 

in there, 

without leaving a trace of any form of tampering at all... 

Dan Feldman, Thank You sir – that really is a tremendous piece of work and a GREAT puzzle! (and sorry I’ve let it tarnish like that, but it’s been very well loved!)

[If you’re serious about DanLocks, you’ll have read about the two versions out there – B followed A and has an extra little sting in the tail – mine’s an A.]