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. 

Strijbos’ Lotus Puzzle

Wil’s recent announcement of a new puzzle was greeted with plenty of excitement, and more than a few orders. 

We’d first been introduced to a Lotus prototype back in the middle of last year when Wil came over to visit us at an MPP. Several people had a go at it and none of us got very far … so he made it a little more difficult and kicked off production!

Lotus is the latest blue anodised aluminium puzzle from the Strijbos stable. From the side it resembles a classic impossible object of a trapped nail in a block of wood with a coin around the nail. On the edge there’s a nod to Wil’s other trademark feature – a dovetail joint running through the entire length of the body. On one end you can see a little black stopper and something rattling behind it… the nail slides in and out, a bit, but not enough to do anything useful, the washer around the nail spins pleasingly and the dovetail joint is resolutely locked… oh, and there’s a threaded hole in the top of the body … but that’s your lot!

Shake it and it rattles – surprise! At least that’s something to work on…

Solving the Lotus is very much a sequential discovery process … and you’ll find some rather interesting and very well hidden and/or disguised tools along the way – working out which ones are useful, and how they can be used is a wonderful little voyage of discovery. 

This puzzle is like an onion in the way that it lets you in one layer at a time … and one of the best features is that you can’t see how many layers there are from the outside, so you have to feel your way forward without really knowing how much further you have to go.

At one point you’ll get a little prize for all your troubles, and you may be tempted to think that’s the end of the road - far from it … you need to keep going until you discover where this puzzle gets its name from … or until you’ve disassembled it totally if you’re really curious. 

Wil’s helpfully pointed out that the solution doesn’t require any bashing, tapping or knocking (or any other variation thereof!) – so don’t bother investigating that, you won’t solve it that way and you’ll just feel silly afterwards! 

Please be careful though, there are plenty of opportunities to launch tools in various directions so please play carefully, and heed Wil’s wisdom and only remove that peg after you’ve solved the entire puzzle and you’re sure you know what’s going to happen…