When Louis spent the weekend at
my place for MPP6 and the Puzzle Braai, he gave me a pair of
puzzles he’d made himself. I was aware that he’d started making some puzzle of
his own recently, and had begun spending his puzzle budget on puzzle-creation
devices (aka power tools) rather than on buying puzzles themselves. And I know
he’s taking this resolution seriously because in the run-up to MPP6 not a
single package arrived on my doorstep addressed to Louis!
The Burr
The first puzzle he gave me was
a little oak six-piece burr – thoughtfully disassembled (!) and in a little
plastic baggy. I had a quick glance at it and noticed two things, and at least
one of them scared me: - One of the pieces has a couple of blind corners on it, and
- The pieces are lop-sided, so the legs are going to be different lengths.
Now one of those would have made
it rather difficult to manufacture, and the other will make it rather hard to
solve … I had a little bit of a fiddle around with it on the Friday evening and
decided that the only way it was going together was with the help of BurrTools – but I wouldn’t resort to that yet, and certainly not in front of the man
who’d made it and just given it to me – that could be seen as rude.
I took it along to MPP6 the next
day and at one point Chris picked it up and asked about it, so I told him all I
knew – it was a short interchange. Louis pricked up his ears and a little while
after Chris had started fiddling around with it, he asked which burr it was and
Louis answered that he was sure he’d recognise it – Chris protested a little
and then Louis announced that he knew that Chris had one … which was just the
clue he needed and it was assembled pretty quickly after that.
Turns out that Chris had deduced
that for Louis to have been able to make that statement quite as categorically
as he did, it would have to be a fairly well-known burr that everyone knew he
had … and that possibly narrows it down to a reasonable number including a pair
of aluminium burrs that Wil had been selling – and this was indeed one of them
– Peter Marineau’s Piston Burr.
…so for his first ever attempt
at making a burr, Louis has fabricated an oak Piston burr with offset arms… the
latter a result of having made the sticks a bit too long to actually assemble
them (one of the moves requires a piece to go around an end) so he added a
feature in the form of a short arm and a long arm on each piece, giving the
resultant burr a jaunty offset – and confusing and intimidating unwary puzzlers,
like this one.
The Box
On a previous visit Louis had
brought along a puzzle box that he’d made with only the most basic of tools –
and it was a pretty good idea. A few folks had a bash at it and they were all
complimentary and helpfully suggested some ideas for improvements when Louis
began talking about his own ideas for developing the box further – some of
those relied on some additional hardware (he’d already rationalised the need
for a router without any help from us!) and ideas were thrown around and played
with…
This time Louis arrived with his
A-MAZING Box #3. The name is a play on one of his forum handles and the
mechanism inside, and came courtesy of Wil, who named it after receiving #2 from
Louis. On the outside it looks like a fairly nondescript box – on the inside,
there lies evil.
I first started playing with it
on the Friday evening before MPP6 – and got virtually nowhere, so I hatched a
sneaky plan and took it along to MPP6 in the hopes that someone might open it
and I might get a clue to it’s mechanism … it was a great plan, and at various
times during the day I got my hopes up when I spotted Wil and Chris playing
around with it, however, the box remained locked tight. Uh oh!
The following weekend I sat down
and had a serious bash at opening it, and it must have taken me about an hour –
and I think it’s excellent! It gives a little feedback, and even having seen
its predecessors, I’d totally over complicated things in my mind. While I was
working on it I noticed that the bottom panel would move from time to time, so
I developed a fixation on that for a while … and yes, I even tried spinning it
and blowing into it – but I did not attempt to drown it! There are limits…
This puzzle has clearly been
designed by someone who knows how puzzlers think – and he has used this against
you all the way through – building in quite a few dead ends along the path to
eternal happiness, or at least an open puzzle box, as the case may be … gosh
I’m really glad (NOT!) that I mentioned that to him when he was here last time.
He’s been more than a little cruel on some of those branches and forces you to
eventually do what you really don’t want to do – it’s a really clever design –
one of the things I put to him in an email after I’d opened it was “Heaven help
us if you ever decide to take this seriously!”.
Louis has definitely put his new
power tools to very good use and come up with a great little puzzle box.
Thanks Louis – there’s a special
spot on my puzzle box shelf for this one now.
