Swing Lock

Splinter Spierenburgh has been designing mazes for years. He’s published an eBook of mazes and designed a bunch of 3D-printed mazes and even entered one of them (MazeRoll) in last year’s Nob Yoshigahara Design Competition.

Realising that they lived in the same town, he met up with Louis Coolen and the two of them started discussing some ideas that Splinter had for a 3D-printed puzzle lock … and a short while later the bright orange Burgh Lock appeared – I snapped up a copy and really enjoyed it. 

There are a couple of very interesting moves that you don’t expect, along with a fair number of perfect red herrings. It’s a really fun lock, but I found that most puzzlers are a bit weary of damaging it, in spite of telling them not to worry about it and that the material is quite strong enough for the movements required. 

Fast forward almost a year and Splinter told us he was working on a new puzzle lock and showed us some pics of his first prototype (in wood!). Louis had been allowed to have a bash at it and had given Splinter some feedback. A couple of refinements later, a second round of prototypes was produced and this one was given a slightly wider test and resulted in some promising sounding noises, so a production run was commissioned. 

I got an email from Splinter offering me a copy of the Swing Lock and given that I’d heard some good things about it, I didn’t hesitate and ordered a copy which duly arrived in Barnt Green the next week. 

It’s a handsome brute of a puzzle – beautifully machined in aluminium (there is a cheaper acrylic version available). It’s not light – this lock will clearly not be forced open – you either open it the right way, or it stays closed! It comes with a key and there appear to be two keyholes (which is a bit unusual!). 

I started fiddling around and pretty soon discovered that there was a clear acrylic plate inside the lock that was clearly (now!!) blocking one of the keyholes – not knowing if this was important of not I continued exploring. 

Turning the key in the keyhole doesn’t appear to do an awful lot and no matter what you do initially, the haps stays rigidly locked in place… 

This is a nice puzzle lock – you won’t be afraid to hand it around to relative puzzle muggles, and similarly, they won’t be afraid to have a real go at solving it…

The mechanism was totally new to me and an absolute delight in simplicity – although working out how it works is a brilliant challenge … Splinter has made the front panel of the lock removable (with the help of a Philips screwdriver) so that you can see the mechanism in action – a brilliant touch!

Suffice it to say that my idea of what was going on in there was thoroughly wrong and hopelessly over-complicated…

An excellent addition to my little collection of trick locks – it joins the Popplocks in pride of place … I hope that Splinter continues to try out new puzzle designs like this on us… the world needs more great puzzles! 

Mooi so, Splinter!

[Read Gabriel's thoughts on the Swing Lock over here...] 

Karakuri Appliances

One of the great things about membership of the Karakuri club is that from time to time you get offered interesting puzzle boxes that they don’t make widely available. A little while back one of their updates arrived with details of a number of new puzzles themed around everyday objects – a few of them looked rather interesting so I put in an order and I’m delighted with the three boxes I ended up getting: two of them are incredibly cute and the third looks fantastic and it’s a cracking puzzle as well!

Tatsuo Miyamoto’s contribution was a dinky little box in the shape of a Refrigerator. It looks like a good, solid old-fashioned double door fridge, with sturdy hinges on one side and big latches on the other. Sadly the latches don’t seem to do an awful lot – and to be fair – it wouldn’t be much of a puzzle of they did!

A little experimentation leads you to discover some neatly hidden little “useful bits” that unlock the first compartment – right where you’d expect it to be. That leaves an obvious area for a second compartment although the way into that one is a bit less obvious – not too tricky, just less obvious.

The fun little telly (Old TV to give it it’s proper name) really looks the part, especially with the little bunny ears aerial on the top of it. The dial has a wonderfully satisfying click to it when you rotate it and the button below the dial begs to be played with.

This one took a little longer to solve than the fridge and some of the red herrings kept me occupied for a while before I stumbled across the solution.

Having opened it, it took me  little while to work out just how the locking mechanism actually kept everything all nicely locked up – it’s wonderfully simple and elegant, and very effective. Clever piece of design.

The last puzzle box in the batch comes in the shape of a Twin-Lens Reflex Camera, neatly branded across the top with its designer’s name: Kawashima. Being a bit of a camera-nut since I was a kid, I was never going to pass up on this one – it really looks the business with all the detailing on the lenses. 

It’s also easily the toughest of the puzzles in this pile.

The locking mechanism is quite unusual and very well disguised. Only problem was, having discovered the hidden compartment, it was pretty clear from the external dimensions that I was still missing something… and no amount of fiddling around and close examination would reveal a way in or even where that way in might be. 

I ended up spending a long time trying to find something new and ultimately failed – having to resort to the neat little solution card for the answer – and I wasn’t disappointed or embarrassed by that – it is not only fiendishly clever, it is perfectly hidden – a fantastic puzzle box that looks a million dollars.  Winning combination.

A Puzzling Visitor

A while back I had an email from Rox asking how far I was from Warwick, and after a brief geography lesson (Rox, we hold MPPs in Warwick, it’s half an hour from my place!!!!) we established that she was coming to Warwick for a conference and might have a couple of days spare for some puzzling so I offered to put her up at my place either side of the conference and we’d have a braai and invite all the (reasonably) local puzzlers I knew around…

Now Rox is a veritable force of nature - easily an eleven on the Beaufort Scale. She blew into town last Wednesday evening and I collected her from the airport after a full day’s travelling from the Finnish hinterland. She’d done buses, trains and planes and had set out disgustingly early in the morning to get across to Birmingham, so when she arrived I got a huge hug as I think she was pretty glad to have finally arrived at her next base.

Gill sorted us out with some dinner and we all caught up before Rox and I headed up to the cave for some relaxed puzzling. Rox would root through the cabinets, find something interesting and then settle down on the floor to play and take photographs. We called it a night mercifully early as she’d had an exhausting day and I had to go to work the next morning and appear vaguely intelligible. (It’s a new thing I’m trying!)

While I was at work, the plan was for Gill and Rox to head out for some shopping as Rox needed a pair of smart shoes for a dinner and she hadn’t had enough space to pack a pair because she’d pretty much filled up her luggage with puzzles. Gill managed to drag her away from the puzzles eventually and by all accounts the shoe-shopping was successful, although during the course of the day I did get a series of pics on my phone of Gill puzzling and Rox in Gill’s craft room on the sewing machine… I suspect that Rox’s trip to the dark-side was short-lived because the next time I saw her, she wasn’t asking about sewing machines and all the talk was about puzzles again…

 

After the day with Gill, Rox went off to her conference in Warwick for a few days and I collected her on the Sunday morning for an unofficial MPP gathering-cum-braai at my place.

The guys all arrived at about 11 in the morning and after the initial introductions there was a whole lot o’ puzzling going on…

Chris had brought along a Rubik’s cube that needed its centres aligned (there’s text on most of the sides and some of them weren’t properly aligned even through the cube was solved). Although I used that as an excuse to bring down my Mindcuber – I knew it wouldn’t be able to line up the centres. While my little robot crunched and ground its way through a couple of cubes that were either too small or too stiff, Steve sat quietly playing with Chris’ cube until he’d sorted it all out and was able to give Chris his cube back with all the text properly aligned … thus dodging any potential OCD disasters.

Steve had printed a couple of copies of Stewart Coffin’s Fourth Dimension (Coffin #94) for us to play with. Steve’s been looking through Stewart Coffin’s designs to find ones that haven’t been made in large quantities because they’re particularly hard to make accurately (in Ap-Art, Coffin noted that he’d made four copies ) – and then throwing them at his 3D printers so that the puzzling world can enjoy them. He gave me a copy and challenged me to find the two symmetric assemblies and then gave Rox a special copy because he knew she would be pressed for space in her luggage – it was jumbo-sized!

Rox made sure that everyone had a bash at pulling David apart and rebuilding him and played with her Many Horses – although I have to admit that I never quite managed to make a horse that passed muster properly – all of my attempts had something rather significantly wrong with them… in spite of having 104 real solutions! I’m just not very good at puzzling!

I (partially) burnt some meat around lunchtime and everyone did their bit to try and reduce the pile of food we had produced – the braai seemed to go down quite well, although the enjoyment of the meat might have constrained the participation in the homemade cheesecake afterwards … which meant there were a few slices left for me during the week!

More puzzling followed lunch and I was rather grateful for Ali managing to manhandle a rather tight Bishop open (no comments, please!) although the new Rook remained firmly locked all day.

Several folks spent a while playing with the new (to me!) Waterfall Box and while they all enjoyed playing with the puzzle, it remained firmly locked up … Ali probably came closest although at one point when he thought he was making good progress he realised a little too late that he’d been going in the wrong direction and had the box right back at the start position. 

Louise had us in stitches after she successfully, albeit rather unconventionally, solved Wil's Dita Perrier bottle, assembled it rather hurriedly and then suffered a malfunction of sorts that saw the bullet in bits and a crystal penis roaming around inside the bottle... now if you know this particular puzzle, you'll know that spells Trouble (yip, with a capital "T"!). True puzzler that she is, she managed to extract everything, legally, no less, and then reassembled it properly.

Russ and Adin spent a while twiddling purple Revomazes and there was a little bit of discussion about the first of the R2 Revomazes, which didn’t seem to have found much favour among the MPP-crowd who’ve partaken in them. I spotted an opportunity and harangued Russ into taking away my unopened (literally still sealed in bags!) Titanium and Handmade (v2) Revomazes and solving them for me. After my experiences with the first Handmade Revo, I can’t bring myself to invest time in solving the next one and the Ti…I know I’m only hurting myself…

 

Some of the guys left around 6-ish and we ended up serving another round of braai to the folks who stayed behind… significantly reducing the pile of leftovers to manageable proportions. Yet more puzzling ensued…until the last bunch left at around 10 o’clock. Long day… FUN DAY… but a long day.

We all crashed pretty soon after that (Rox was after all operating on about an hours sleep from the night before) and then in a large reversal of roles, I found myself sending Gill off to work while I had the day off to make sure that I got Rox to the airport on time.

Rox and I trawled through a few more puzzles in the cabinets – notably Peter Hajek’s “What Now?” box: it was great fun watching Rox talk herself through her options along the way before committing and then solving the box. Rox took stacks of pictures of the cabinets and all the individual puzzles that pulled out… judging from the number of pics that she’s subsequently posted on FaceBook, she’s taken more pictures of my puzzles recently than I have!

I managed to get her safely to the airport and heading away on the next leg of her European trip before going home for a wee rest.

It was great having Rox around, fun spending time puzzling with her and excellent to be able to introduce her to some of my puzzling mates over here. Thanks for coming to stay, Rox and thanks a stack for all the pressies you brought over for Gill and I. 

[For another point of view, have a look at Rox's version of events over here!]