Thank You!
I’m a little embarrassed
to say that I owe quite a few people
a thank you and I’ve been rather lax about
that recently… so this post is a bit of an attempt to address the issue and
thank a few folks publically.
Let me start with
Big-Steve – ever since he started
printing large quantities of puzzles
on his home-grown 3D-printers, Steve has
been giving me puzzles with frightening regularity…from some potentially
promising experimental ideas that turned out to have too many short-cuts to a puzzle that really should have been named the St George’s Burr
after the colour-scheme he used. There were 3D-printed versions of the Peanut (remember that psychedelic one?) and his modification on the theme. His generosity wasn’t limited to
just the things he’d printed himself though and a while back be gave
me a copy of his i.materialise project Tripod.
Steve had a great
story about a wheeze he’d discovered that
meant that if you designed a box around your puzzle pieces that meant that the
eventual object could be picked up as
a single piece, the price being
charged would plummet… so he tried it
with his Tripod puzzle and discovered
it worked rather well… of course since then we’ve been through all the
Shapeways price-ma-geddon antics and everyone’s aware of the need
to finesse your designs through these services to reduce their costs, but
at the time it was quite amusing to
find what appeared to be a loophole, that the 3D printing service then actually
publicised to show everyone else how
to do the same thing. (And, yes, these days they all offer all sorts of tools
to help achieve that!)
Tripod looks like an intimidating puzzle with 30 (mostly)
notched sticks that you need to build into a ball-shape. When it arrives from
i.materialise the sticks are inside a neat little box that needs to be snipped
open to release the sticks and (usually) a small cloud of white powder. Rinse
them off in some water to remove the excess powder and you’re ready to play…
the notches are nicely sized to grip the neighbouring sticks securely… and one
of the sticks has no notches, so it’s probably going to be a key-piece… but
apart from that, there aren’t many clues as to where you might want to start…
I found it helpful to familiarise myself with the way they
all fit together and to start working toward a ball-shape. Invariably at some
point you’ll come up against a situation where you can’t insert the next piece
because something’s blocking your way, and then it’s a good idea to come up
with some sort of strategy…
I got lucky and managed to formulate a reasonably simple strategy
that led me straight to a solution – but I still find the geometry rather
confusing and think these sorts of puzzles are rather tough… Thanks Steve –
it’s great!
The next puzzle was given to me by James Dalgety, although
it too was designed and in fact printed by Steve. The JCD is a disarmingly
simple-looking three piece burr where the pieces are shaped into James’
initials – no only shaped that way but they also fit together rather neatly
when they’re not assembled – great design touch!
Assembling them is a lot trickier than you might think it
should be… the basic shapes are exactly what you’d expect, but the little bits
in the edges that stick out to make up the letters tend to get in the way, and
as a result, the standard assembly simply doesn’t work… it needs careful
attention to the exact shapes and sizes that have all been rather deliberately
crafted to stop you doing all the usual things… find the right unusual thing,
though, and you’ll have a neat little colourful three-piece burr assembled.
Next up is a trapped coin puzzle designed and made by
Mineyuki Uyematsu for my friend Matt from across the pond. Matt commissioned
Mine to make up a bunch of Texas-themed puzzles to give away to his puzzling
friends and I was lucky enough to get a copy – cheers Matt!
Made up of a few layers of acrylic held together with
screws, the puzzle holds a Buffalo Nickel captive, albeit partially visible
through a hole on the front. With a Texas flag on the front and a map of the
great state on the back, there’s no doubt about where Matt hails from…
While it’s not a hugely complicated puzzle, I’ve known
seasoned puzzlers play with it for weeks on end before finally finding the neat
little solution that allows the coin to drop out … and there’s a wonderful
little feature to it that some folks manage to miss in spite of solving and
resolving it stacks of times…a lovely little detail that really didn’t need to
be there, but sets it apart.
The next Thank-You goes to Chris for giving me a lovely
little copy of Coffin’s Fancy This!
He gave it to me on one of his visits explaining it had come
off a new 3D printer he’d been testing at work – the quality looked pretty good
and I was somewhat amazed when he told me that the printers were selling for
under £250 – I suspect that when I get my life back again I may need to
investigate them… I kinda like the idea of building a printer and then printing
off the odd experiment to torment other with… one of these days…
Back to Fancy This!… it might only have a handful of pieces,
but the geometry is a little mind-bending again. It’s quite a fiendish design
that combines elements of sequential assembly and co-ordinated motion, and even
when you think you’ve got the hard part sussed, you’ll find there are stacks of
almost-right assemblies where the pieces all go together absolutely fine and
even look like the correct assembly, until you get to the last piece that seems
to be the wrong way around… it amazed me just how many different wrong ways I
managed to find to assemble these pieces before I eventually managed to find
the right way to put them all together so that the last piece locks everything
into place – thanks Chris… not just for the puzzle, but also for tempting me
into experimenting with 3D printing… between you and Steve I suspect I won’t be
able to resist much longer!
The final thank you in this round goes to a friend who gave
me this rather unusual-looking object. It looks like an industrial two-pin plug
with some rather untidy wiring sticking out the end. There weren’t any
instructions that came with it so I had to try and work out what the heck the
object was, if in fact it was a puzzle! (This friend collects all sorts of
things so it could, for instance, have been an oddly-shaped bottle-opener for
all I knew!)
When I showed it to one of my friends with an engineering
background, his first question was why there were four wires coming out the
back when there were only two pins on the plug – that’s probably a tip to the
solution right there… surely!?
Turns out it probably is a puzzle and the object is to get
it to do something unusual…it isn’t easy and the elegant method for doing it
turns out to be rather neat, repeatable and not require too much physical
effort – which is just as well as I’m a lazy old asthmatic puzzler. Thank you
for a very special gift!
Hook,
line and sinker?
