Tube It In

Recently I got rather lucky and stumbled across a copy of Wil Strijbos’ original steel Tube It In puzzle…

Finding a copy for sale isn’t all that simple these days – I’ve only seen a single copy pop up on Nick Baxter’s auctions recently, so when I spotted one for sale, I jumped on it … only to discover that there was another version for sale as well, so I ended up getting two versions at the same time – that WAS rather lucky!

Tube It In was Wil’s Exchange Puzzle at IPP21 in Tokyo back in 2001. It consists of a set of rectangular steel tubes and bands of various thickness's and diameters which all nest rather neatly inside the largest piece. 

In its solved state, it looks like a small steel box with a drawer in it … open that drawer and you’ll find a bunch more bits inside, in fact, if you aren’t careful you’re likely to end up with a lap-full of little bits of steel … almost all of which are different sizes and shapes. 

Spread them out on a table and you’ll be amazed to see that there are in fact fourteen separate bits of steel tube making up this tricky little assembly … and only two of the pieces are identical – all of the others are unique …. and somehow they all manage to fit inside the largest piece. 

The good news is that you can apply some logic to solving it and given the sheer amount of steel that you need to fit into the outermost tube, there isn’t much scope for obfuscation and general leading astray – so you can start at one end of the scale, as it were, and find an efficient way of doing things and you won’t end up wandering down too many blind alleyways. 

The previous owner had scribbled some letters on the sides of most of the tubes, and that might have given some clues to my puzzling mates, so I’ve cleaned off all the markings to make things more interesting. :-)

It’s a fun little puzzle and shows that puzzles can come from the simplest of sources if you keep an eye out for things like that – something that Wil is most certainly a past-master at!

Right … so I was pretty darn chuffed when I found that copy of the original version, but when I found a copy of John Devost’s 2006 wooden version, I knew I’d found something really special! It didn’t take long to decide I needed that one as well…

Absolutely faithful to the original design, John created a gorgeous version in wood – my copy is (I’m pretty sure, but I’ve been wrong in trying to identify woods SO MANY times now that I wouldn’t lay any money on it!) made in walnut with maple slip-feathers and in its solved state it looks to all the world like a reasonably plain puzzle box (albeit one with some lovely slip-feathers!) … in fact, when I first saw it, that’s exactly what I thought it was and paid it no more attention, until someone pointed out what it was … and from then on I wasn’t letting it out of my paws! 

As you might expect from John’s work, each of the layers of this puzzle fits perfectly into the next, and the combinations of tubes all add up just perfectly to the space available … lay out the two versions next to one another and the pieces are instantly recognisable between them and the solution is identical… but the wooden one is simply beautiful! 

A great pair of puzzles to stumble across – I suspect there aren’t that many wooden copies of Tube It In out there in the wild so I consider myself hugely lucky to have come across them both at the same time.

Gouge Packing Puzzle

John Devost makes some gorgeous puzzles and from time to time he’ll sell a few of them on Puzzle Paradise. A little while back he posted a couple of copies of the Gouge Packing Puzzle, designed by fellow Canadian Gaétan Gouge. The first thing that caught my eye was the absolutely stunning woods that John had used … and knowing from experience that John’s craftsmanship is superb, it took only a couple of seconds to hit the Buy Now button. 

When it arrived, I was over the moon – John’s attention to detail is fanatical, right down to bevelling not just the edges of the box, but the corners as well … and then there’s the trademark Devost slipfeathers as well…

Right, enough gushing about how beautiful it is – tell us about the puzzle!

Inspired by the famous Hoffmann Packing Puzzle, Gaétan wrote about this puzzle in Cubism For Fun [Issue 33] back in 1994, explaining that he’d sought to use voids in the puzzle as an intrinsic part of the puzzle itself. The challenge is to pack a total of 26 cubes into the box so that nothing projects above the lip of the box. There are 21 cubes of unit size 5 and the rest are 8 units cubed. All of these cubes need to be packed into the box which is 18 units cubed internally. 

I started out by randomly experimenting with various combinations of big and small cubes and managed to find some useful interactions between the size of the box and the sizes of the cubes – that’s got to be useful! 

Surely??

Time and time again I’d manage to find a way to get them all inside the box only to find a couple of errant blocks hiding on the desk behind a burr or something. Eventually I went back to basics and worked with what I knew – what would be efficient – and what wouldn’t be – and how to make use of the fact that there we a strange number of larger cubes … and then it all makes sense, as long as you can see it all in three dimensions … it really is more about managing the voids than fitting the pieces in. 

This one’s really interesting and makes you think outside the box, in a sense. And when you find the solution, it all seems so obvious, as long as you’re thinking about it in the right paradigm.

Quintet in ‘F’ by Stewart Coffin

Quintet in ‘F’ is number Stewart Coffin’s design #253 ... two hundred and fifty three! 

And some of them didn’t get numbers! 

And he’s still going!

OK, back to the puzzle in hand - Coffin #253 served as Rosemary Howbrigg’s Exchange Puzzle at IPP31 in Berlin and as you might expect from the name it employs five ‘f’-shaped pentominoes in the tray packing puzzle. 

Mercifully this time (unlike Lean 2) the tray is symmetrical, in fact it’s a rhombus so it’s very symmetrical ... however the pieces aren’t – and there are five of them, which makes building a shape that’s symmetrical a little tricky... 

My copy came from Puzzle Paradise where John Devost has recently picked up his woodworking tools after a couple of successful restorations. I tend to keep an eye on Paradise just in case anything interesting turns up... John’s pretty good about warning folks when he’s put a bunch of new things up for sale on Paradise, but every now and then one or two new things will sneak on before he’s had a chance to wing an email around to warn anyone... 

So  one day I happened to spot this particular puzzle appear out of the blue – just a single copy available with a zebrawood tray and spalted myrtle pieces and I thought it looked terrific so I snagged it. It arrived less than a week later in perfect condition having made the journey across from Canada in a padded envelope.

 

John’s done a super job on this puzzle – the tray has a floating zebrawood base , the corners are finished off with wenge slipfeathers (one of his trademark features) and he’s signed and dated the back of the tray. 

It’s an excellent little puzzle and the combination of an odd number of non-symmetrical pieces being fitted into a perfectly symmetrical tray provides plenty of blind allies to be explored. I got fairly lucky and managed to stumble upon a solution quite quickly, but I’ve heard of some pretty mean puzzlers being stumped for quite a while ... but then it IS a Stewart Coffin design, and you wouldn’t expect any less ... would you?