I owe Steve a huge thank you…

Steve and his mate Simon decided to dabble in some 3D printing a while back when they had some time to kill – and at the time they couldn’t quite find a 3D printer that suited them, so they designed one and then promptly started producing them for sale. (Yip, Bright boys!)

Ever since then I feel like whenever I’ve bumped into Steve at either an MPP, a BBQ or at Peter’s place, he’s always just produced something new and he’s passing them around for folks to play with. Sometimes he’d let us give him a couple of quid for a copy, but often he just insists that you take a copy and refuses all offers of cash.

Some of them have been classic Stewart Coffin designs – latterly particularly ones that haven’t been produced much because they’re a pig to make accurately out of wood (no trouble if you’re 3D printing them!) and some have been prototypes of Steve’s own designs. (I love my psychedelic Peanut!)

A little while back Steve and I were talking about lithophanes that James Dalgety had introduced me to a year or three back. Lithophanes are wondrous etched or moulded works of art on semi-translucent surfaces (think thin porcelain) which display a picture when light shines through them… so you’re basically getting a grey-scale picture where the depth of the grey is determined by the depth of the material at any particular point. 

Look at them in ambient light and they’re not very interesting, but put a light source behind them and a picture emerges. Anyway, Steve had mentioned that he was fiddling around with them on his Threedy printers and the very next time I saw him he handed over a freshly printed lithophane of my ugly mug in full manic IPP Exchange mode – it’s taped to the window in my puzzle cave to intimidate everyone who comes in to play with the toys… not sure it’s working (the intimidating bit!), but it is a great little talking piece. 

Thanks Steve!

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.

Wil Strijbos’ Egg

At the risk of becoming a “me-too” blogger, I feel I need to write about Wil Strijbos’ latest new release. Jerry and Kevin have already shared their impressions, so I’ll try not to repeat too much of what they’ve already covered and give you my impressions.

Both of the guys have covered the pre-history of the Egg, its recent re-discovery in James Dalgety’s collection and alluded to the challenges involved in getting the Egg produced in China – Wil’s been working on getting the Egg just right for quite a while now, so when he announced it was finally ready there were quite a lot of us throwing money in his direction for the privilege of being puzzled.

His first run of 55 Eggs sold out in a little over a week(!) … don’t worry if you missed out, there’s bound to be another run along in the near future.

Right – onto the puzzley-bits…

Dainty, she ain’t – I’m not going to give you another shot of Wil’s Egg next to a standard chicken egg, suffice it to say, Wil’s Egg’s bigger! It’s a rather nicely anodised pink aluminium number with some lettering giving you the puzzle’s name, a serial number and Wil’s great, if almost illegible, signature on the bottom. 

The top and bottom halves of the Egg are clearly separate pieces (no that’s not a spoiler!), but at the start of the solve, there’s precious little movement between the two pieces. You’ll need to spend some time playing with it and working out how to get things going and once you do, you’ll be rewarded with a little movement, first this way, and then that way…

Make a little more progress and you’ll even be able to peek inside a little – not enough to be in any way useful of course, but enough to let you know you’re making progress. You may be able to work out what was stopping your earliest progress, but you certainly won’t get any clues on how to progress! (Wil’s mean like that!)

I spent quite a while in the middle of this solve, spread over a couple of evenings… mainly because I’d got some other puzzles at the same time and I was flitting between a couple of them trying to progress them all, so whenever I found I needed to pause and think, I was picking up one of the other puzzles…

In the end I must have spent an hour or two on opening the Egg the first time – and I’m not ashamed to say that it needed a pretty ruthless, rigorous approach to working out how to get into it… the mechanism is so finely tuned that unless you get the solution pretty much spot on it throws you back a bunch of steps … generally without you even realising it!

There’s just enough feedback to keep making progress and work out what you’re trying to do, and ultimately being able to picture what’s probably going on in there is a really valuable skill. (Alternatively access to a handy NHS X-ray machine if you’re that way inclined!)

When you do get it open you have to appreciate the tremendous balance between simplicity and incredible engineering to get all that stuff working together so nicely… you’ll also realise why the Egg needs to be that size.

Having opened it I set about studying the insides very closely … and spotted a number of incredibly subtle little details that probably didn’t have to be there, but adding them significantly increases the potential traps for the unwary.

Locking it all up again requires a sequence of actions to get everything back where you started from – there’s no easy reset on this one!

It’s a CRACKing puzzle, EGGseptional in every way, superbly EGGineered, good OVALue for money and EGGstremely good looking. No YOLKing!

[Hey, I behaved myself right up until the end! You know you’d be disappointed if I hadn’t done that … :-) ]

Three more Fuller gems…

Eric Fuller offers some stunning dinky little puzzles from time to time. Made from laser-cut acrylic and the little bits of wood that would otherwise get thrown out, they generally go for less than $20 but come with all of the accuracy and superb finish that you’d expect from Eric’s bigger puzzles. I’m a big fan of them, although I know not everyone shares my enthusiasm for them. 

In the last round of Cubic Dissection offerings there were three of these little guys and I couldn’t resist picking them up – especially since they cost about the same as one of the other puzzles on offer. 

Vortex is a deceptively simple-looking little guy. 4 little C-shaped pieces are trapped in a single sheet of acrylic in a vertex-y shape. Designed by Chi-Ren Chen, its official name on Ishino’s site is 4C Vortex. A couple of sliding moves present themselves early on and you can make yourself a bit of space to get the pieces moving around… for move around they must! The first piece requires 21 moves to release it, and you’ll need another 13 moves to get the remaining pieces free…

Oh, and if you’re guessing that there are probably rotations involved, you won’t be disappointed – there are plenty!

Once you got the pieces out, working out how to get them back in should keep you “amused” for a while – once you start putting the pieces into the frame you quickly run out of space to manoeuvre the pieces in there and it’s not hard to see why you need those 21 moves from getting the last piece into the frame until they’re all lined up and interlocking properly. 

Carbo Cube is a neat little cube made up of 4 burr pieces in checkerboard colouring trapped inside a pair of clear acrylic plates around their waists. Designed by Donald Osselaer, it has a nice balance of dead-ends to get lost in and interesting moves. 

Getting the two plates to move the way you want them to can sometimes be a fit fiddly, especially when the burr-pieces have been moved and you’re a bit ham-fisted like I am…

Navigate your way past the dead-ends and you’ll find that this puzzle isn’t as tough as you might have thought it will be, but there is an unexpected little way of making some extra space in there to get things moving a bit – very cute. 

Gaia comes from prolific Turkish puzzle designer Yavuz Demirhan – four burr-pieces are trapped in a combination of two acrylic plates and a frame that allows the plates to slide at right angles to one another. 

Right from the get-go there’s a lot going on – plenty of movement to explore, although most of it’s not all that useful. In fact you can get two of the pieces almost all the way out in just a couple of moves – yet the actual solution requires a full 11 moves to release the first piece…

Decent little challenge in a pocket-friendly size, with all Eric’s usual quality. 

Bonus Puzzle – Eric recently started selling a budget range of “Raleigh Puzzles” aimed chiefly at new collectors who weren’t necessarily after his high-end limited edition puzzles. They’re significantly cheaper than the limited edition puzzles, but seem to be made of the same woods and while they may not be oiled or waxed like his other puzzles, the fit on them is second to none… so I’ve bought a few of them and found them to be absolutely brilliant.

One really stood out though – Ray Stanton / Akio Yamamoto’s Slideways burr is an absolute classic. Three identical pieces slide together in a co-ordinate motion to form the classic three-piece burr shape. The original was machined in aluminium and it’s gorgeous, although it can tend to suffer from spontaneous disassembly issues…

Eric’s wooden version has no such trouble – and while it might not end up being quite a “collectable” as the aluminium original – the fit of the pieces is astonishing and the friction between them is more than enough to hold them together until you apply pressure in the right directions, at the same time. 

An excellent acquisition – you cannot go wrong with an Eric Fuller precision-made puzzle for $15! 

I highly recommend Eric’s range of Raleigh Puzzles.