DCD 2015

Attending DCD each year is one of my guilty pleasures – an excuse to go away and spend the best part of a weekend with some of my puzzling mates from around the world – and as I’m not organising or hosting any of it, I get to selfishly just enjoy it all – I like DCDs!

DCD 2015 was once again held in Voorburg, a suburb of The Hague. I flew across to Schipol on the Saturday morning meeting Steve (M) who’d flown in from London and Louis who’d caught the train across country from Eindhoven to act as tour guide and fellow-puzzler. We hopped on a train through to The Hague and met up with a bunch of puzzlers at Rob Hegge’s place for a gentle afternoon’s puzzling and snacking (which turned out to be important as I’d contrived to miss out on getting any lunch!).

When Wil arrived, Rob showed him a rather locked up copy of the Butterfly Lock Box and sought some help, so Louis (as Wil’s Chief Approbation Manager) was duly roped into getting it back into a more reasonably solvable position and a few minutes later it was presented back to Rob for his further puzzling pleasure… unfortunately Taus then took up the challenge and with just a little encouragement he made superb progress through the solve, reassembling everything the way it should be and looking quite pleased with himself, probably wondering what all the fuss had been about… 

When he was asked to put it back into the original position for Rob he had that gloriously sinking-feeling-look on his face when he turned the key and realised something important… Pleasure and PAIN indeed… so after all that, I suspect that Rob was exactly back in the same position that he was in before we all arrived, in spite of Louis helping him out in the middle.

Steve (N) had brought along several copies of Derek’s latest helical variants Twiddle Dum and Twiddle Dee that were generally getting twiddled by various puzzlers during the course of the afternoon… I managed to twiddle one until it released the first piece, but then took absolute ages to put it back into its starting position. I made sure I picked up a pair of them from Steve’s table the next morning!

When we all started getting a little peckish we headed across town to the hotel so that some of us could check in and we could find some other puzzlers for dinner… after we’d checked in and reassembled in the lobby, it turned out that there were 11 of us for dinner so we wandered down to the usual Italian restaurant we frequent on these trips only to discover we were a little too late and they couldn’t give us a table for 11… which I guess shouldn’t really have been a surprise. We headed back to the hotel, safe in the knowledge that the restaurant there wasn’t full and they did in fact manage to feed us… a rather nice meal – along with several puzzles on the table doing the rounds throughout the whole affair.

After dinner we found a couple of the German puzzlers entertaining the barman so we engaged in a little gentle banter before admitting defeat and heading off to bed… only to hear from (Big-)Steve that they’d carried on for another three or four hours, well beyond the time when the cleaning staff emerged with their rug-suckers.

Next morning there were bunches of puzzlers at breakfast and just after nine everyone had checked out and headed across to Sint Maartens. At registration we were each given a Threedy printed DCD board burr that looked suspiciously similar to the JCD version I talked about over here. [In spite of that similarity it still takes me a while to assemble it!]

Inside the hall there’s a familiar gaggle of puzzlers around the tables laden with treasures from around the puzzling world. After I dump my bags in the corner I start wandering around and greeting old friends. 

Marcel shows me a pair of his original chess pieces that he’s found and has for sale and a couple of hours later I notice that at least one of them has been sold… the other one taunts me for hours as the copy I have is somewhat jammed and I could be doing with replacing it… but I resist that urge.

Alfons Eyckmans has a table full of beautifully made burrs of all descriptions. I spend a while trawling through the various options and getting recommendations from Goetz (“on that one I’m struggling to release the third piece” – SOLD!). I end up picking up a few burrs that are terribly reasonably priced for such beautiful creations and Alfons throws in a tray-packing puzzle for free on top of it… merci Alfons!

Michel has a table full of duplicates that he’s bought over a number of months and is now offering to his fellow collectors like me who aren’t as good at scouring the internet’s auction sites for bargains – I get a pristine original copy of The Brain, still in its original pretty-good-looking box to add to my collection. (Yip, I really didn’t have one yet!)

Rik seems to be doing a pretty good trade in signing people up for NKC memberships during the course of the day and Wil has a steady stream of people raking through his various plastic crates of wonder. At one point he invites me to trawl through a crate around the back that has a Tom Lensch copy of Kagen’s Maze Burr, some rather collectible Karakuri pieces (have you ever seen one of Kamei’s Bombs in the flesh?) and some rather lovely Coffins – I end up playing with a KW-2 cube for ages and cannot open it… eventually we open the solution to make sure it’s not malfunctioning and of course it isn’t, I’m just being useless… it’s a brilliant mechanism so I end up buying it…

I got to meet Christoph Lohe and chat for a while over some of his designs that have been made by the Pelikan guys… I picked up a copy of Letterbox after it comes recommended by a passer-by (Goetz again I think - he may be on commission by now! Nope! Christoph reminded me it was Dirk...) and I’m somewhat embarrassed later that day when he gives me a copy of his variation on an East German sliding tile puzzle along with a booklet of his own challenges – sehr dank Christoph!

I was quite chuffed to pick up a twisty puzzle from Tony Fisher – Yes, you read that right! It’s even a twisty puzzle that I can do… I’d been meaning to get a copy of Tony’s replica of the original wooden Rubik’s cube for a while, so when I spotted a single copy on his table I took it off his hands… he’s done a great job on these making them look thoroughly authentic, down to the odd stickers on some of the pieces and the occasional uncovered screw-hole, but he’s built them on a modern mechanism so they behave beautifully… it’s one twisty puzzle that I will definitely be keeping proudly on display!

Splinter had a table with all of his puzzling creations laid out for everyone to try and buy – I saw the Burgh Swing Lock keeping some folks rather confuzzled for a while…

In the afternoon we had three lectures from the assembled international contingent:

• George Miller started out the afternoon’s talks with an overview of the development of his Cubigami puzzles – including some rather astounding facts behind the specific nets chosen for his various Cubigami productions… having a bit of a math-bent I found it all rather fascinating.
• Roxanne Wong gives us a talk on her various puzzle factory visits over the past few years and shared some insights on the development and manufacturing processes of some of the puzzles that are now available on the mass-market.
• Steve Miller gave us a talk on the design and development of complex mechanical puzzles based on his experience with the Tessarisis and Fire puzzles. Seeing the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes on design, prototyping, manufacture and marketing is quite daunting…

Somewhere around 5pm things began to wind up and we headed out to grab a train back to the airport where Steve (M) and I grabbed a burger before heading off in our respective directions…. and I was home before 10pm – having done an awful lot of puzzling, prattling and purchasing in a great little weekend break.

I can’t recommend it highly enough!

A few locks...

This post looks at a few locks that have recently been perplexing me. 

First up is a pair of Marcel Gillen-doctored locks that came courtesy of a friend who was down-sizing his collection. For all intents and purposes they look like a pair of standard ABUS locks. They show no outward signs of tampering, yet inserting a key and turning doesn’t generally have the desired effect… and shaking them results in at least a little rattling, which is a bit non-standard for such devices.

Each lock comes with a pair of identical (yes, I checked – and FWIW that’s a good idea!) keys, neither of which appears to unlock its padlock.

These locks have been well-and-truly doctored and need some careful attention, more than a little trialling-and-erring, and it may help to try and picture what could be going on inside there.

Find how one of them works and you might think you’re onto something for getting the second one open, and you’ll be wrong!

Their respective modifications are somewhat different, and while one of them offers a fairly short solution the other requires several more steps and can be a little fussy… but both will behave predictably in a practiced pairs of hands.

A really nice little piece of puzzling history – with no hint of anything untoward on the outside of the locks.

Next up is a Hales-special – Padlock SH-AW. Shane loves his locks and a little while back I managed to put him in touch with a pair of those Gillen locks – and I think he rather enjoyed them, to the extent that he promptly went out and bought some unadulterated padlocks with a view to adulterating them.

Having approached Marcel for permission to have a bash at making his own versions (and getting the blessing) he set about milling dirty great chunks of brass out of the locks and then playing around with the innards – to produce his take on one of Marcel’s locks – with a twist – because, well, why not take the opportunity to make it even harder (and in the process make picking the lock well-nigh impossible!)?

It arrived in the post, and even though I thought I knew the basics of what he’d done, I still struggle with it – a lot!

Shaking this lock produces quite a lot of rattling inside there – a lot more than the Gillen lock it’s modelled after in fact… is that a clue?

This one’s tough! In fact after more than a month with it, I still don’t feel I have it beaten – it sits on the desk where I can pick it up in between bits of work on the PC and try variations on the “moves” – but I still haven’t found the killer combo that opens it every time…

At our last MPP Shane brought along a series of photos of the modification process and it is quite incredible to see just how butchered the lock gets during its modification, and yet after being rebuilt, it could easily pass as being new-in-box … if not for the stamped personalisation on the side (SH-AW) it would still look like a pretty unassuming lock – albeit one that won’t open unless you treat it just right!

Thanks Shane! It means a lot to have a personalised thoroughly-Hales-adulterated lock in my collection. 

The third in this post is another little piece of IPP memorabilia - Frank Chambers' IPP20 exchange puzzle called Mikslok (with not a trace of Corian in sight!).

Another doctored lock, this one also rattles a bit when shook...

Insert the key and turn - nothing... in fact it won't turn! You'll need to summon your wits and experiment, but it shouldn't take too long to find your way in... interestingly I've managed to find two distinct ways to unlock this one. :-)

As you'd expect, even though you KNOW that he's had to doctor the insides somehow, there's absolutely no trace of any form of mistreatment.

Next up is a rather unusual-looking handmade lock from India. It all looks pretty standard if you overlook the rather odd angles on the key and the keyhole.

Simply inserting the key and turning results in you discovering that the key gets blocked just before it might do something useful … ah well, perhaps the key turns the other way? Nope! Same result…

Turns out it employs a reasonably standard trick that shouldn’t take a hardened puzzlist too long to deduce.

Not the prettiest lock in the collection (that would have to be one of Rainer’s beauties!) but it came from a dear friend with a nice back story behind it… which makes it special.

Last up is an altogether different lock! Designed and manufactured by Louis Coolen (with a little help from Shapeways) this is a little sequential discovery puzzle in the shape of a lock. Louis had been working on this design for a while and had pretty much perfected it in time for IPP35 – so he took a bunch of them to Ottawa and I suspect that he didn’t go home with many of them.

It’s a cute little padlock in white strong and flexible selective laser sintered nylon – one the front there’s a series of H-shaped cuts … there’s something where you might expect to see a keyhole and you can feel that the shackle will probably come out at some point, but at the moment it’s well and truly trapped. 

It’s important to note that every little detail of the design (and implementation) has been deliberate – nothing has happened by chance, so if you spot something, or think that doing something unusual as a result of the materials used might help, then either it’s part of the solution, or it’s a red-herring – but it’s not there by chance… Louis spent literally months and months refining every aspect of the design and nothing had been left to chance in there…

Which makes it a rather delightful little sequence of steps to finally open the lock – from an initial reveal and release, to working out what the heck to do with the tool you find, until eventually the shackle can be removed.

Great design Louis! A really fun little puzzle to work through…