Popplock T13

Some things in life are very reliable – take Shane’s opinions on puzzle locks for example: if he rates one highly, then chances are good that any mere mortal is going to find that very thing absolutely astounding, so when he put a picture of a new T13 on Facebook and began singing its praises, I knew we were in for something really special…

Of course, given the opportunity to buy a shiny new puzzle from Rainer, I’m more likely to mortgage a kidney than pass up the opportunity, so when the opportunity arose, I accepted, perhaps a little more eagerly than usual given Shane’s unbridled enthusiasm.

First impressions of the T13 are, indeed, impressive – this object has presence – it demands attention – it also demands a sturdy surface to play on given that it’s a huge two kilogram lump of steel and brass.

The shackle appears to be made of three thick sheets of hardened steel riveted together – reinforcing its pedigree as a proper, if somewhat oversized, lock. The keyhole is offset at a jaunty angle begging to be played with. The back has a springy disk with Rainer’s customary logo and the lock’s name engraved on it… and the only other slightly unusual feature are two disks on the top of the lock inside the shackle… the rest looks pretty, er, lock-like.

I started by doing the obvious and immediately I knew by the gentle click and my inability to reverse my actions that Rainer was already laughing at me… I’m sure it’s only me, but I got suckered in and knew I’d done something a little silly right from the very beginning. (In my defence, I think you have to…)

I won’t bore you with all of the details, but I will tell you that the solve took me weeks. I spent a long time thinking that there was absolutely nothing else I could try, explore or experiment with, only to make the tiniest little discovery a few days later and then find myself trapped for a few more days.

The solution path on this one is well and truly long and winding, but along the way you will be rewarded with several fantastic “A-Ha!” moments when this little lump of metal does something utterly wondrous – if your jaw doesn’t hit the deck at least three times when something strange happens, then you aren’t human!

This puzzle keeps on surprising you right up until the very end… and even the final element is good enough to hold up a seasoned puzzler for the best part of a week or more (not me, a friend – I’m not that seasoned!).

Another phenomenally good puzzle lock from the master-craftsman – a worthy successor to all of his foregoing Tricklocks – another Jaw-dropping mechanical masterpiece… Oh, and Shane was absolutely right!

Popplock T12

I bring you a somewhat overdue blog post about a stunning puzzle that I got at just about the same time as the country went into lock-down… that will become important later on in the story… in the meantime, you just need to bear in mind that was seven months ago!

When I got the eagerly awaited email from Rainer announcing that he was ready to start selling his new Popplock T12 I didn’t waste any time and a few days later a rather heavy package arrived in Barnt Green.

The T12 is a brute of a lock – this thing will do serious damage if you’re ever clumsy enough to drop one. It deserves respect, and it definitely got more than its fair share of that from me… over the course of the following six and a half months or so!

In its starting state, you have a key with nowhere to shove it, a large block of brass, which might just as well be solid for the lack of anything doing on it at the start, and a really solid looking straight steel shackle. (Mental note: can you call a straight metal bar a shackle if it performs that role? … Hales?)

There are a couple of obvious things to try at first and they generally result in finding something actually rather useful: a keyhole! (Bet you didn’t see that one coming! Even thought you were given an actual key with said lock, remember…?!)  Putting the key in and turning it, sadly, does not open the lock…

Examining things a little more carefully provides some clues as to some things that might be interesting at some point  (that’s a whole lot of somes and I’m not good at numbers!), albeit right now they’re stubbornly useless…

Several days later my troubles began: I thought I’d found something interesting and potentially useful, and indeed it may well have been, were it not for the fact that I found I couldn’t retrace my steps and I’d somehow managed to trap the key inside the lock… cue mild panic… and a seriously concerted effort to release said key.

A few weeks later I reach out to my tame locksmith to ask if he’s ever seen that before on this puzzle – “Eh, nope! – You’ve obviously done something stupid, ya muppet!” – Not a direct quote, actually he was far more sympathetic and suggested I send it back to Rainer, but neither of us was convinced that a T12 would actually allow me to do anything irreversible – and I decided it was far more likely “operator error” so I kept at it...

It sat on my desk for the next few months – getting picked up from time to time whenever I had some downtime in “the office” but sadly the key remained very much trapped.

By now we’re well into lock-down so I can’t even rely on the usual services of my puzzle-whisperer to rescue me from my stupidity – he’s trapped in The Netherlands.

It became a bit of a standing joke with some of my puzzling mates on our regular Sunday evening video calls – I’d show them the T12 with key trapped, they’d laugh at me and ask me if I’d tried blowing on it yet. (Yes. It didn’t help. Damnit!)

After several more weeks of their enjoying my misery, they finally took pity on me and coached me through some things I swore I’d already tried, exactly that way, about a million times already, but somehow the key was no longer trapped!

Promptly reinvigorated I managed to make some serious progress over the next week and a bit – using some of what I’d managed to learn while the key was trapped in there to finally release the shackle, a mere seven months after getting this thing…

What do I think of it? Given that for the vast majority of that time it was apparently locked up refusing to give up its key? It’s BRILLIANT! This thing has locks on the locks – getting all the way through the solution gives you a terrific sense of achievement – you earn the victory on this one… for a puzzle with so little apparently going on on the outside, this one packs a big punch! Would I have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t had to wrestle with it for months to give up its key? Hard to tell… either way, there’s no denying it’s a fabulous new puzzle lock from the master.

Popplock T1

About three years ago I was lucky enough to get to play with Wil’s copy of Rainer Popp’s T1 Tricklock at his annual Queen’s Day Puzzle Party… since then it’s found its way to a new owner across the ocean who seems fairly chuffed with it. 

It’s been on my “Gosh wouldn’t it be nice to have a…”-list for quite a while, but having heard rumours of the prices they’ve been changing hands at recently (yes they do, occasionally, change hands, privately) I’d more or less given up on that until I won the lottery… and then recently it seemed I’d won the lottery – not literally! But figuratively… in that a friend recently found one for sale and offered it to me – I won’t tell you how long it took to say “Pretty please!” and “Take my money!” but it had arrived at Puzzling Times HQ a few days later…

…and it’s every bit as awesome as I remember it being three years ago! 

This copy looks a bit different as the shackle is made up of straight metal parts rather than the customary rounded stainless steel shackle on the later copies. It’s marked as “T1 001-333” although I’m pretty sure that there weren’t 333 copies made of this one – in fact someone who should know, suggested it was closer to just a tenth of that. 

It’s a big, handsome lump of a puzzle with no apparent keyhole (or key for that matter!) and the shackle appears to come almost out of two holes at the base of the lock. There are a couple of interesting buttons located around the sides and some remnants of filled holes where the innards have no doubt been inserted, but apart from that, there is no apparent obvious place to start trying to open this thing. 

A fair amount of experimentation will lead to something unusual and probably rather interesting, although your brain will almost certainly stop you from making any progress at all at this point – it knows what’s possible and what isn’t – unfortunately the next move is somewhat impossible and is for me, the most charming thing about this lock – if you’re thinking, you’re stuffed! :-)

Find that wonderful next move and then things really start to open up for you – all of a sudden you’re spoilt for choice, but finding the right thing to do next is, once again, a fantastic challenge – there’s another lovely little piece of theatre just before you head into the end-game… where you’ll need all your wits and senses, you’ll need to examine everything super-carefully and then work out what you haven’t used yet before you can finally perform the final sequence of steps and find the shackle is freed.

Huzzah!

You should be warned that while this lock may have become somewhat legendary due to its limited numbers and tremendous scarcity, and the fact that Rainer’s gone on to create another nine awesome puzzle locks in his series so far, it’s not universally loved – some people have found it too hard as a puzzle to be entertaining – and I can see their point to a degree. 

Solving it the first time, it is a pretty brutal puzzle – subsequent solves, if you keep your wits about you, shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes, but you do need to be pretty exact when you’re executing some of the moves… and some copies seem to be less inhibited in some respects which make choosing the right spots a little harder! 

Me? I love it – as a puzzle and as a beautifully hand-crafted object…

Popp Lock T10

Rainer Popp is definitely the master of puzzle locks… he has a reputation for producing challenging puzzles in the form of beautifully crafted locks, so his new designs are eagerly anticipated by both puzzle and lock collectors around the globe. 

When I spotted an alert from Rainer to say that his newest design, the innocuously named T10, was available for sale, I immediately dropped an email to my favourite puzzle purveyor to ask if any might be available and ordered one on the spot… and I’m very glad that I did as they seemed to be pretty much all sold by the following morning – in fact, as I sit writing this I’m not aware of a single re-seller who has any in stock… :-(

It arrived on a Monday evening and it’s a brute, weighing in at about a kilo – it looks every inch the big, solid, secure padlock. Designed to look like a padlock made up of stacked steel plates, it’s made of, err, stacked steel plates, topped and tailed with brass bars and the obligatory stainless steel hasp. It comes with an interesting key and the padlock has a very obvious place to shove it…

A cursory examination of the lock in its unsolved state shows an interesting feature… and once you start playing with the mechanism, you instantly know exactly what you’re trying to achieve…

So the first thing we do is insert the key and turn … and something rather magical happens – hypnotic even… to the extent that I spent probably the best part of an hour experimenting with that simple little motion, and a couple of variations on it… if that were it’s only party trick, I’d be sold on it… but it gets better!

From your initial experiments you’ll learn how to influence things, and that there are obstructions to just how freely you can choose to influence those things… sometimes that can be a right pain in the shackle!

I spent a really long time in this phase of the solve… getting myself to the place where I thought I was able to pretty much do everything that I wanted to be able to … almost – there was always one little element that eluded me, and I’d pretty much concluded that it was impossible… and that was the little breakthrough I needed: allowing myself to think that it might be impossible.

From there there’s a delightful little discovery that literally provides the key to further progress… and it still took me more than a week to finally solve the thing from there… I had it so close for ages that I could just about reach out and touch the solution, but it refused to budge… turned out I was actually quite a long way off, it just looked like I was close… and in the end it had taken me many, many hours over the course of three weeks to finally solve it…

This thing is a brute of a puzzle – nobody is ever going to open this one and feel cheated out of a sense of achievement – EVER! 

In fact, I’d probably go as far as to say that if Rainer didn’t ship them with a solution booklet, quite a few of them would remain unsolved.

Investment-grade hard-core puzzle lock from the master…

Popplock T9

One of my puzzle-peddling-pals recently asked me if I was interested in Rainer Popp’s latest creation – I won’t bore you with the response, suffice to say that days later I had a heavy brass object in my grubby mitts.

The T9 may look like a common or garden padlock, albeit a rather large, very sturdy padlock. But it is nothing of the sort. It comes with a fairly simple looking key and not a lot else. The back of the lock has Rainer’s cat logo and “T9 Popplock” engraved across it.  The front has a central keyhole that’s surround a two rows of rivets / screws – six evenly spaced in the inner row and the three around the outer ring have red markings on them. (Here be danger?)

The rest of the lock has a couple of the usual plugged holes that have probably been drilled out to insert the locking mechanism, but don’t really provide much of a clue to the eventual operations of the locking mechanism itself.

Clearly with nothing else to do, you shove the key into the keyhole and turn … and turn … and turn. After spinning the key around for a while and realising that all you’re doing is getting a little older (at least the key isn’t gripped in there like some other puzzles, eh Rox?) you decide to switch your attention elsewhere...

Paying more careful attention to some of the elements of the lock allows you to progress a little with a delightful little surprise, and while I can repeat this little move at will, I have to confess that even after solving the puzzle, I’m still not exactly sure why it works that way…

Right so having made a tiny amount of progress, you find yourself with something new to explore and find a use for. This section of the solve takes a while and needs a fair amount of rigorous exploration – I started finding something interesting going on but it took a long time for me to get to the point where it was going to start being useful. I went through a couple of phases of discovery on this section, each time thinking to myself “That was interesting, but it doesn’t seem to do anything”.

Soldiering on I got to the point when all of a sudden something mind-blowing happened – and I mean really mind-blowing. Literally take-your-breath-away-wonderful. The sort of thing you wish for in a puzzle… that moment makes this puzzle worth every penny… and you’re still not done yet – there’s a another layer on this onion to be peeled back before you can finally open the shackle.

T9 has easily become my favourite Popplock and I’m looking forward to finally getting the solution booklet (my mate held onto it so I wouldn’t be tempted – nice bloke, eh?) so that I can see the cutaway drawing and work out how “that bit” actually works.

The T9 has a wonderful sequence of steps that gives you little victories along the way so that you know you’re on the right path, one of the best “A-Ha!” moments I’ve seen in a puzzle in a long time and some incredibly well-hidden bits. The machining on the T9 is simply sublime – the movements are all silky smooth (if something isn’t going, don’t bother pushing any harder, it won’t go!) and the sneaky bits are brilliantly hidden.

In short, it’s AWESOME! (and yes, it’s easily worth the price!)

You should be able to get hold of a copy via your friendly puzzle-peddler, Grand Illusions (although they're saying SOLD OUT already!) or Puzzlemaster, or indeed directly from Rainer off his web-site.