Before I went along to IPP32 I’d arranged to buy one of Neil’s
latest creations, Hex Stairs, designed by his mate Derek Bosch. Neil’s written
a series of terrific blog posts starting over here
chronicling his build and finish process on these puzzles ... including the
production of the first prototype that turns out a bit larger than he’s
expecting – so large in fact that you can put a bottle of Guinness inside it
... although someone seeing that picture has lead to Neil being commissioned to
build a super-sized version to fit around a wine bottle ... the mother of all
Hex Stairs?
Neil brought out a couple of copies on the Wednesday evening
in the bar and I chose a great looking copy in wenge, purpleheart and curly
maple. Neil’s clearly spent a lot of time on the finishing and he’s brought out the life in the woods he’s used. I like the combination of
the deep, dark wenge against the reasonably deep purpleheart, being totally
offset by the maple in the middle band.
Derek’s design bears some similarities to Oskar’s Domino Tower
– if you change the shapes of the tiles, and work in hexagonal structures
rather than squares, and add a layer – so really it’s not like Oskar’s
Domino Tower at all!
Hex Stairs consists of 6 (hex!) winding pieces in
alternating colours that interlock to form a stable hexagonal tube. Given the way
the colours alternate, there are a few different ways to arrange the pieces –
but you’ll always have the maple band around the middle. The shapes of the
pieces are such that if you handle the assembled tube naturally, it will stay pretty
resolutely together (the natural grip pushes opposite sides together, and as
long as you’re spreading that pressure across more than one layer, it pushes
together). If however, you start putting pressure across individual layers, you’re
likely to find, as Jim did in the bar that night, that this sucker’ll come
right apart on you! And once it starts coming apart, you’re better off letting
it come all the way apart because putting it back together needs all of the
pieces to be rather neatly aligned before you can slide them all together.
That need for absolute alignment was my undoing when I was
fiddling around with Neil’s mini-sized copy of Hex Stairs in the bar that night
– his tolerances were unbelievable on that skinny little copy... thankfully
mine's a little more forgiving so I can actually reassemble it without too much
fiddling around looking like I haven’t a clue what I’m doing!
It’s a cute design from Derek – it definitely adds a bit
more of a twist to things than Oskar’s Domino Tower and the extra pieces make
it a bit more interesting to get things lined up neatly enough ... and terrific
craftsmanship from The Juggler ... Thanks Neil for my second Juggler-crafted-puzzle!
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... I also got a couple of walnut Revomaze stands that Neil
offered to build after the guys at Revomaze stopped offering wooden stands
before they stopped selling puzzles – resulting in a few of us having nice
wooden stands for some of our puzzles and leaving the rest of them rolling
around on a shelf.
The stands are pretty similar to the original stands so they
fit right in with all the others and provide snug support to a couple of rather
nice little puzzles ... and came in handy recently to take some pics of the
latest one being opened... Cheers for that too, Neil.
I've written a couple of posts in the past about Revomazes ... I really enjoyed solving (most of) them and the buzz you get when you open one of the metal puzzles and see the beautifully machined core stays with you for a long time ... but you have to work pretty hard to solve them (even the simpler ones) so a lot of folks never get to see those mazes - and trying to explain what's happening inside there can be a bit of a mission...
Now one of the things that the folks on the Revomaze forum have been baying for for a while, has been a clear sleeve, so you can see the insides as you're going through the maze - for demonstration purposes after you've solved the puzzle, of course!
