Tricklock T14

I was lucky to get hold of a copy of Rainer’s latest creation from my usual source back in October last year… and until last weekend, it had me thoroughly beaten.

This thing is a beast – not just because it weighs 1.7kg(!) – in puzzling terms, it’s an absolute brute – it will make you sweat for every little step of progress. And I sweated a lot…

Rainer’s a playful soul – sometime his locks come without keys, sometimes they come with keys, as this one does, only there’s no keyhole… which is an interesting way to start!

I spent several sessions across many days of poking and prodding at various features with literally nothing to show for it by way of progress – sure there is stuff you can fiddle with – and it’s quite a satisfying little fiddle – it just doesn’t seem to actually bring about any sort of change in state…

…so I persisted until I chanced upon something that actually did bring some change – I’d hesitate to call it progress at this stage – but a bit more experimentation provides some definite progress – to the point that I have more pieces than I started with – that’s got to be progress, right?! [Well, it might be, or I’ve managed to break something… but this is from Rainer, so I know it ain’t broke!]

From there progress is slow and anything but steady… a number of times I make literally zero progress for weeks on end – one particular stage of the solve (you’ll know “the one”) provides plenty of mirth from my mates on my weekly puzzle call  when I’m forced to report nil progress for about six week on the trot… and not because I haven’t tried – I’m pretty sure that I know what I’m trying to achieve, I just can’t make the magic happen…

…but oh boy, when it finally does, it is awesome – every bit of frustration instantly forgotten – I’m smitten! 

But still there’s more – it might feel like you’ve conquered Everest, but somehow Rainer’s given you yet another peak to climb – thankfully this one doesn’t take me nearly as long… and I can send a pic of my freed shackle to my mates and thank them for their encouragement along the way.

Rainer’s craftsmanship is second to none – the tolerances are phenomenal – there are several surprises along the way that you don’t see coming because those secrets are so beautifully hidden. If a lesser mortal had attempted something as audacious as this, they wouldn’t have a hope in heck of pulling it off – Rainer grins and says “Hold my beer.”

T14 will surprise the most jaded of puzzlers out there – definitely not a simple solve, but one that will leave you with a huge sense of satisfaction!

Haleslock 6 aka Who Dares Wins

Take one part incredibly talented designer of puzzle locks, mix cautiously with two parts brass puzzle wizards, add a little monkey business and you have the perfect recipe for puzzling mayhem – enter Who Dares Wins, from Ali, Shane and Steve (other arrangements may be available!). 

I got to play with a prototype of this puzzle at an MPP several moons ago – I remember saying good things about it and encouraging Shane to make some more copies of it, mainly so that I could add one to my collection… ‘cos it made me smile when I solved it…

Some time later, the lads sent me a production version in the mail and boy had things changed! The form-factor was totally unrecognisable: now a handsome black cylinder with some brass accents around the waist and a brass lock peaking out the one end with Shane’s trademark signature stamped into the metal… it looks brilliant!

It comes with a rather pedestrian-looking key, the sort that you might bump into on a night out with the lads, albeit attached to a custom keyring complete with nameplate and goal neatly laid out. You have no excuses!

Of course introducing the key to the lock makes some very satisfying clicky noises, but seemingly does virtually nothing to actually unlock the puzzle… this is Haleslock 6! Your latest challenge has arrived…

Everyone already knows that Shane is an absolute whizz at designing and crafting puzzle locks. He is also a rather good solver and student of the solve, and of the solver, and as a result he knows how puzzlers think, so don’t be surprised if he ends up occasionally using that against you…

This puzzle has a wonderfully elegant solution, some surprising twists along the way, and a proper laugh out loud moment when you solve it. (I defy you not to laugh at that bit…you’ll know!) This puzzle screams “COLLABORATION!” – there are some clear touches from both the Monkeys and from Shane – and the whole is definitely greater than the sum of the parts.

It’s way better than the prototype – this one didn’t just make me smile, it made me laugh out loud! 

....get one! You'll love it...

Hokey Pokey

Hot on the heels (Hey, he’s been busy!) of Hokey Cokey in 2018, Steve Nicholls brought us Hokey Pokey in Jerusalem earlier this year. Apparently, half the world was somewhat confused by the Hokey Cokey and couldn’t quite bring themselves to sing the right words, insisting that it was the Hokey Pokey, so in order to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, Hokey Pokey was born, and duly exchanged at IPP40.

The handsome packaging (replete with encouraging hamsters!) provides the goal: Remove the shackle and Identify the pun. It cradles a brass padlock and a keyring with some of the strangest items you could possibly imagine. Apart from the pair of keys (not that strange I grant you), there is a cork and a wine stopper with a large 40 on top of it… now in fairness the hamsters on the top label are imbibing a good red, so perhaps we’re being encouraged to partake as well? (There is no wine in the packaging – I looked…

The lock helpfully has the name engraved across the top so you’ll always be able to tell you Cokey from your Pokey (DON'T!), and that cork has the name on it too, so you can’t get the keys mixed up… not that the keys seem to be of any use at all – Steve appears to have given us a couple of keys that don’t do anything at all: inserting them into the keyway and turning in the traditional manner confirms that Steve might have given us the wrong keys… quelle surprise!

OK, so if the keys don’t work, what else can we do?

We can tug on the shackle and see it move a tiny bit… but no more. We can take everything off the keyring and examine them, yup, that’s a wine stopper with a big fat forty on top of it (it was exchanged at IPP40 remember?) and the cork can be removed from its eyelet – weird, but not unusual, at least not for Steve…

The first part of the puzzle turned out to be fun and a little surprising and I was dead chuffed when I had the shackle open…

The second half of the puzzle was somewhat more elusive and I ended up spending months toying with various bits of wordplay, trying to work out how all those weird things on the keyring could possibly be described and what to make of some of the other bizarre discoveries that I haven’t mentioned in here for fear of spoiling a surprise… I literally had lists of words and I spent ages trying to combine them and squeeze something funny out of them as Steve had told me I’d know when I had found it…

It turned out I needed a fair amount of nudging on a rather long train trip with Steve before I groaned big time and admitted he’d outdone himself… the pun is definitely worth hunting for – you’ll love it and hate him for it at the same time – it’s perfect!

Chapeau sir!

Picolock

Boaz Feldman has been carrying on the family tradition of creating excellent puzzle locks for a good few years now and this year he entered his latest baby, Picolock, in the Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition.

I had a couple of goes at it in the Design Competition Room and I can confidently state that I made absolutely ZERO progress, so when the Puzzle Party rolled around, I made sure that I had some cash to hand over to Boaz for a shiny new copy of Picolock.

Back at home I had several more goes at trying to open the lock (yup, that’s the goal!) and continued my unblemished record of not troubling the solution in any way… I did get to know the lock rather well.

You receive a neatly engraved, ever so slightly modified 40mm Nabob padlock. The key(?) is attached to the shackle by one of those ubiquitous super-strong cable keyrings. All of that comes in one of Boaz’s neat little embroidered pouches along with an instruction card – there can be no doubt what the goal is and that you shouldn’t be using any external tools…

Over the course of my several unsuccessful goes at opening the lock I explored what I considered to be all of the usual tricks of the trade – there are one or two interesting visual clues and I found myself focusing on them… but unable to make anything useful of any of my observations.

If truth be told, I did rather obsess on one of those visual clues rather a lot and I’d pretty much convinced myself that something magical would happen with a particular feature, only I failed to find the secret release that would allow that to happen… and in the end I spent most of the three intervening months concentrating on those things, and getting nowhere at all… not that any of my friends took the proverbial – well not much… well…

In the end I found I’d succumbed to the gravest of errors: not properly discounting something before moving on and leaving it behind – it turns out there was something I could do that I’d previously convinced myself wasn’t possible because I’d explored all of the possible avenues exhaustively… well, not quite.

…and having revisited that avenue, a whole new world opened up before me and all of a sudden, I was on a wild and exciting ride of new discoveries, tools and techniques and soon enough, an opened shackle.

Having spent three months being thoroughly baffled, the final fifteen minutes of this journey were sheer excitement and joyful discovery – the three months of zero progress and self-doubt are totally forgotten and once again I’m an enormous fan of Boaz’ creativity and serious puzzle-designing-chops – Picolock is exceptional and deserves its place in the family dynasty.

Great work Boaz!!

...and the good news is that Picolock is now available for sale at Boaz' webshop over here...

 

Simple Lock 1

Simple by name… simple by nature?

Most definitely not!

I missed out on the first release of this puzzle a while back, but on Louis’ most excellent recommendation, I joined the waiting list and managed to grab a copy from a subsequent batch… and I’m rather glad I did.

It is an exceedingly handsome little beast – plenty of nicely brushed aluminium, a super-solid looking stainless-steel shackle and a conspicuously removable plate on the back. (The lock comes with a hex-tool and an instruction to only use it after fully solving the puzzle in order to see your serial number inscribed inside.)

The accompanying key actually fits in the keypath (great start!) and will actually turn (we’re two-for-two already!) and you may even be surprised when the shackle starts coming out (it’s all going swimmingly so far!), but there’s a rather large “but” in your pretty immediate future at this stage!

Roundabout now things go a little Pete Tong, and you may well find yourself picturing Ben, the creator of this little monster, having a laugh at your expense.

Somewhere along the obvious path you need to take, you will find yourself unable to turn around and head back for the safety of your starting position – game on… ready or not!

That whole bit of the journey takes mere seconds… the rest of it took me many, many weeks!

At various stages I had a shackle in one hand and a locked-up padlock with a key that wouldn’t budge in the other – in fact that was quite often the position.

There are some lovely discoveries and some very subtle little touches that had me barking up the wrong tree for an awfully long time. There’s a tool or two to be discovered (including some “where the heck did that come from?”!) and then a really long (‘twas for me!) journey of discovery to work out all of the steps required to get everything back to the starting position.

It's really an excellent puzzle from just the solve perspective - what makes it really mind-blowing IMHO is taking the back cover off and seeing just how elegant the innards are – there is zero over-complication anywhere. Every precisely shaped piece is there for a reason – some to allow you to do something, most to stop you from doing something.

Ultimately this puzzle’s design really earns its name – just don’t be fooled into thinking that the name will be descriptive of the solution in any way, shape or form!

Bravo Ben!

Loophole

Boaz has serious pedigree when it comes to puzzle locks, so when he announces he has a new puzzle I always pay attention… I also usually pay up and end up getting puzzled.

When Boaz announced the launch of Loophole, I did what I always do and soon after I had a neat little black bag with the usual logo sitting on my desk begging me to play…

Inside there’s a somewhat doctored NABOB padlock with a key attached to the shackle for safe-keeping. Removing the key from the shackle (that part isn’t meant to be a puzzle – whatever you do, don’t ever admit you found that bit challenging! ;-) ) enables you to insert it into the locking barrel and simply turn the key to open the padlock… YEAH RIGHT!

OK, you CAN insert the key – but for the life of you, you won’t get that key to turn….

Time for some closer observation – there’s one rather obvious modification on the face of the padlock: there is a hole going right through the darn thing! The first “O” in Loophole is fresh air(!) … which is interesting, as Laurie was always minded to say.

Next up there’s another dirty great hole in the side of the thing… and when you shake it, it rattles. It’s all rather confusing.

When you do approach it properly and with some deference, it will begin to give up its secrets – you’ll find some even more interesting things, and then possibly even begin to postulate on interplay. There are a couple of things to think on and a really interesting challenge to befuddle.

Find a suitable strategy and you’re laughing – laughing, and unlocking the padlock.

Once you’ve solved this little guy you really do have to marvel at not only the ingenuity, but also just how well all that “stuff” has been disguised and camouflaged.

Bravo Boaz!

Loki

I was one of those folks who signed up for Boaz’s announcements so that I’d know as soon as Loki was available… and ordered one as soon as it became available… and it arrived soon afterwards.

However, since it took me virtually two months of trying to solve it, on and off, this blog post is only seeing the light of day now… well after most people will have bought it, and solved it, and told everyone else they liked it… but here I am anyway, ‘cos it earned my respect… lots of it!

Boaz has impeccable pedigree when it comes to puzzle locks – his dad is almost certainly the undisputed king of modified lock puzzles – everybody rates them by how they compare with the Danlock. Boaz himself has produced some excellent modified lock puzzles using some wonderfully imaginative ideas in the form of BLock and BLock II… so when he announced that he was particularly proud of Loki, we all expected something a little special.

Boaz did not disappoint.

Loki is indeed the very king of tricksters – fooling you at literally every turn – never letting you make much progress without dropping another massive roadblock in your path… and even when you might be tempted to think you’re done, you’re only halfway, trust me!

I suspect that like most folks I made a bit of progress quite quickly – and that little bit had me impressed from the get-go. There is some very classy machining involved here. From there I hit a roadblock that literally stopped me for more than a month… I had some theories about how I needed to progress, but I couldn’t work out how the heck to make them work… until a massive “A-Ha!” struck, ironically as I was describing what I wanted to do to a fellow puzzler – Nigel’s a patient listener!

Finding how to execute that plan, with all its little tricks took another week or two and that gave me what felt like a massive step forward – except Loki’s tricks baffled me once more and it took another few days before I finally had the shackle out!

Hurrah! Cue sense of achievement and victory photographs…

…only to be thoroughly crushed when I tried to reset things, and realised that they wouldn’t work the way I wanted them to…

Fast forward another week or two or experimenting this way and that, including making life very difficult for myself in search of a feasible reassembly path… so I did me a THINK (c) and simplified things, and found a way through the morass and had everything back where it had started… leaving me with a profound respect for this little trickster and the cunning man behind it.

As a puzzler you might have seen one or two of the ticks somewhere else, but there are several you’ve never seen anywhere before, and you have absolutely never seen that many of them all in one neat little NABOB-sized package before.

Boaz, you are your father's son and you ought to be extremely proud of this puzzle.

Mind the Gap

Back in December Andrew Coles announced that he had a new design that he was almost ready to inflict on the public. He offered a few of us the chance to purchase an early copy and given just how different Lock Out was, I immediately sent him some PayPal to secure a copy… and not long after I had a big old hunk of brass in my paws.

Mind the Gap is another Abus lock that Andrew has modified into being a trick lock. This one has a hefty straight shackle that passes between two extended bits of the main body of the lock (apparently this is a shutter-style lock) – it looks like it means business – and if it doesn’t intimidate you at least a bit, you’re clearly a locksmith. For the most part it doesn’t look like it’s been heavily modified, although there is a screwhead that looks a little incongruous, suggesting that all is perhaps not quite what it may seem.

The lock and a pair of keys on the customary AC key fob come inside one of Andrew’s gold embossed velvet bags. The little card that accompanies the lock asks you to fully open the shackle… which is interesting, normally you wouldn’t need any form of qualification in an instruction like that… but there must be a reason… surely.

…and indeed there is – it becomes apparent as soon as you insert one of the keys into the lock and turn it – the shackle spits out, just a little, and stops right there… which sort of feels like progress, only now you have a bit of a puzzle to solve. The locky bit has done its thing, yet nobody in their right mind would describe this shackle as being fully open…

And it turns out that’s the start of a lovely little journey into Andrew’s wonderfully creative world. Lock out used something wonderfully unique in trick locks, and dare I say it, Mind the Gap continues that tradition.

There’s fun and games with lots of things to discover along the way and before you ultimately get the shackle all the way open (albeit still trapped – and that’s right). The good news is that resetting this little puppy isn’t entirely trivial and does need you to keep some of your wits about you…

Once again Andrew has produced something totally new in a puzzle lock – something that will amuse even the most jaded of trick lock afficionados.

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!