72 Pencils

Watson! What have you done?

I first came across pictures of George Hart’s 72 Pencils structures on the internet ages ago. I’d thought to myself “Those look interesting,” and mentally filed away a note to have a bash at making one at some point and left it at that. And life was good.

And then I bumped into Martin Watson at Peter’s EPP – one of his puzzle “finds of the year” was a copy of 72 Pencils that he’d put together for himself… along with a few variations on the theme that he’d brought along to trade away (because, he keeps telling us, that Alice has told him he needs to get rid of them because they don’t have enough space for any more puzzles – it’s been a theme for a while now!).

I didn’t have anything there to trade for one and Martin wouldn’t accept cold hard cash, so he ended up insisting on giving me one – just as well I’d driven across and not taken the train!

We then spent a short while discussing building them and I admitted to a long-standing intention to have a bash myself – fatal error – within a couple of minutes Martin had dispensed just enough wisdom and encouragement to have me thoroughly hooked on the idea of making some up…

…and within a couple of days I’d ordered several hundred pencils from my favourite on-line retailer (other major rivers may exist) – you should see the weird recommendations I get on there now!

The following weekend I settled down in front of the television with a handful of rubber bands, 150 pencils and my iPad tuned to a particular website.

Starting with a fistful of banded together pencils, I began the process of inserting pencils through the major axes, adding lacky bands – finding the fourth axis – the only vaguely tricky part – and then shoving pencils through every single hole I could find for the next hour or so…and swapping lacky bands every now and then when they got too tight.

When it started getting reasonably large, I started paying slightly more careful attention to the shapes and getting things even across the different sides until I had a completed set of neat hexagons on each side, all with four pencils along each edge.

From there it gets fun – man-handling the whole thing to get everything neat and tidy and all the ends neatly lined up… check on the lacky bands and get them evened out, and then you can remove the inner layers of pencils – until you’re left with just a layer or two in each hexagon – et voila!

Now the next step, if you’re keen, is to glue the corner sticks in place on each side…which will allow you to ditch the lacky bands for good… makes things look neater …

Oh, and a couple of words of warning: if you’re using pre-sharpened pencils, you will stab yourself – probably multiple times, and you will end up drawing all over whatever surface you’re using to align the pencils from time to time – I spent a good ten minutes erasing the esoteric pencil markings that covered our coffee table after putting that one together… and I now put a sheet of sacrificial paper on the desk / table although the scribbling isn’t quite Jackson Pollock!

Haleslock 1

My friend Shane fools me regularly… he’ll quite often rock up at an MPP, shove something in my paws and silence me for absolute ages while I try and solve his latest creation. 

His main series of puzzles are absolutely terrific, but his recent adventures into “Interval” puzzles has been pretty darn good too… and I know that I haven’t been the only person to suggest to him that his interval puzzles would go down rather well if he ever decided to make some for sale – heck, there was virtually a queue forming at MPP already! 

At the last MPP Shane had a slightly modified padlock that he was challenging us to unlock with the key provided… and then he wanted our feedback as he was considering possibly making some up for sale… I think I can safely say that the feedback was pretty unanimous with several of us wanting to throw money at him there and then…

Over the course of the next few weeks he teased us with pics of a shed-load of German locks arriving in his workshop, and then the odd pics of various levels of abuse being meted out to the assembled (innocent!) locks.

Toward the end of that process he put a pic or two of the final product up on his website and posted an email around inviting folks to express an interest… and he was probably hoping to shift most of his stock before passing some onto a couple of potential re-sellers… except that within a couple of hours he’d had more takers than he had made locks – which would have left him in a bit of a pickle, so he ended up having to ration his sales on a sort of lottery basis before reducing the volumes that he was planning to pass on to the re-sellers… it’s a good problem to have, as problems go, but it did up the pressure on the poor lad to finish them off rather a bit! 

A short while later I received my copy of Haleslock 1 courtesy of the Royal Mail… and Shane, who refused to take any of my money! (Thanks mate!) 

There’s a key attached to some sort of key ring around the shackle, but that’s not the really interesting bit – at least not to my mind… there’s some pretty serious modifications going on down in one corner of the lock, albeit with no apparent way of doing anything with it… apart from that, the lock appears(!) to be unmolested apart from a serial number on the top of the lock and Mister Hales’ customary signature on the side, just above all that weird modification I was going on about… all-in-all a rather professionally produced puzzle… nice job that man!

Soooo, what’s it like as a puzzle, then?

In a word: GREAT!

If you haven’t seen one of Shane’s locks before, you’re in for a treat… there’s several layers to solving this one… starting from the little set of instructions that tells you not to damage the key ring securing the key to the shackle… "key ring" might be a bit misleading here – the key is attached to a very strong device that seems to be rather well locked onto that shackle… but call it a key ring and challenge the puzzler to extract the key might just sound like a cruel joke for a while…  

(Shane’s used those key rings on some of his previous (short-run!) puzzle locks and heard that some people found the key ring almost as challenging as the locks – so they were duly incorporated into his first production puzzle…)

Find a way to release the key and you can at least pop it in the lock and see if the lock just magically opens – err, NOPE. 

Prepare to spend a while navigating through a few layers of sequential discovery before you can finally stand a chance at opening the lock – and even then it’s anything but simple… the test model he was trying out on us at MPP was just the last bit – and that’s what we were all prepared to pay for and sign up for on the spot… Haleslock 1 has that and a sequential discovery problem or two to solve along the way.

Shane has done a great job of producing a really great-looking puzzle in his workshop… he’s virtually giving them away at the prices he’s charging – I really cannot recommend them highly enough if you like puzzle locks… but I’m afraid you will struggle to find any more for sale – Shane doesn’t have any left and I think there are only one or two re-sellers who may have a few copies – they’re definitely worth tracking down though…

Mike Toulouzas' Fairy’s Door

Just before IPP34 John Rausch’s website listed the 2014 Nob Yoshigahara Design Competition entries and sparked the usual round of guessing as to who the designers and craftsmen might be… 

I spotted something that looked rather intriguing and shot off a speculative email to a friend… a short while later my friend is literally crying tears of joy because he’s just heard the announcement that his puzzle has been awarded the Puzzlers’ Award at IPP34. 

I was exceedingly chuffed when my copy arrived a couple of weeks ago – just in time to take it along to MPPXXi, where it was a huge hit with everyone who had a go at it.

The Fairy’s Door is something really special – it is a thoroughly beautiful object and a delightful puzzle – it wasn’t an accident that it was the most popular puzzle in the design competition among the puzzlers at IPP34… it’s terrific!

Broadly speaking, it’s a box, with a Fairy’s Door on the front of it… and what appears to be an ornate hinge on the right hand side… the detailing on the door and the surrounds is staggering – the door panels have been individually distressed and imperfections introduced to make it look like a quaint old door. The edges have been rounded where you’d expect there to be some wear and tear and it has a pair of big, solid (fully functioning, wooden!) hinges securing it to the surrounding doorway, that looks like it’s been made of rocks. There’s a helpful sign pointing to the Fairy’s Door in case you weren’t sure where you need to address your attention…

 

A gentle tug on the doorknob confirms that the door is currently locked and anyway, that little sign is blocking the way… closer inspection will reveal where the main locking mechanism on the door might be, but there isn’t much of a clue as to how to get rid of it, so you best start exploring…

Finding a few things that do a little more than they first appear to, you’ll be able to work your way through unlocking the first set of locks and find you can open the Fairy’s Door… only there’s a solid wooden wall directly behind it, and unless Mike has introduced some negative space in his puzzle, there’s clearly more to be discovered. 

Find some more stuff to play with, play with it and you’ll be rewarded with the grande opening – and the cavernous innards of the box… that contain a bit of a surprise – something that wasn’t there that Mike’s added to this run of puzzles… something that I think is going to be a really popular addition to the design as virtually everybody who played with my copy made the same comment along the solve only to be delighted when they finally opened the box and discovered Mike's surprise at the end… it’s a great addition to a brilliant design and it’s going to be rather proudly displayed in my cabinet – complete with that little extra touch, ‘cos, well, you know… ;-) 

 

It’s not a tough puzzle, but it is thoroughly delightful and puts a smile on everyone’s face… and you have to read through the solution booklet after you’ve solved it – Mike’s whole family put a huge amount of effort into making it fit with the style of the puzzle and it’s also really delightful! 

A very worthy winner of the 2014 Puzzlers’ Award!

Popp Lock T10

Rainer Popp is definitely the master of puzzle locks… he has a reputation for producing challenging puzzles in the form of beautifully crafted locks, so his new designs are eagerly anticipated by both puzzle and lock collectors around the globe. 

When I spotted an alert from Rainer to say that his newest design, the innocuously named T10, was available for sale, I immediately dropped an email to my favourite puzzle purveyor to ask if any might be available and ordered one on the spot… and I’m very glad that I did as they seemed to be pretty much all sold by the following morning – in fact, as I sit writing this I’m not aware of a single re-seller who has any in stock… :-(

It arrived on a Monday evening and it’s a brute, weighing in at about a kilo – it looks every inch the big, solid, secure padlock. Designed to look like a padlock made up of stacked steel plates, it’s made of, err, stacked steel plates, topped and tailed with brass bars and the obligatory stainless steel hasp. It comes with an interesting key and the padlock has a very obvious place to shove it…

A cursory examination of the lock in its unsolved state shows an interesting feature… and once you start playing with the mechanism, you instantly know exactly what you’re trying to achieve…

So the first thing we do is insert the key and turn … and something rather magical happens – hypnotic even… to the extent that I spent probably the best part of an hour experimenting with that simple little motion, and a couple of variations on it… if that were it’s only party trick, I’d be sold on it… but it gets better!

From your initial experiments you’ll learn how to influence things, and that there are obstructions to just how freely you can choose to influence those things… sometimes that can be a right pain in the shackle!

I spent a really long time in this phase of the solve… getting myself to the place where I thought I was able to pretty much do everything that I wanted to be able to … almost – there was always one little element that eluded me, and I’d pretty much concluded that it was impossible… and that was the little breakthrough I needed: allowing myself to think that it might be impossible.

From there there’s a delightful little discovery that literally provides the key to further progress… and it still took me more than a week to finally solve the thing from there… I had it so close for ages that I could just about reach out and touch the solution, but it refused to budge… turned out I was actually quite a long way off, it just looked like I was close… and in the end it had taken me many, many hours over the course of three weeks to finally solve it…

This thing is a brute of a puzzle – nobody is ever going to open this one and feel cheated out of a sense of achievement – EVER! 

In fact, I’d probably go as far as to say that if Rainer didn’t ship them with a solution booklet, quite a few of them would remain unsolved.

Investment-grade hard-core puzzle lock from the master…