Coffin Involution Cube

A short while back I was trading emails with Scott Peterson when he mentioned that he’d made a couple of copies of Coffin’s Involution and there was one going if I was interested –about a week later it was in my grubby paws. 

Scott was telling me that Involution is possibly one of Stewart Coffin’s less well-known designs and was an interim stage in the development of the Involute Cube – with Mr Coffin then favouring Involute over Involution. Having played around with both of them, Scott reckons he prefers Involution – and frankly I was sold on the idea from the point where he said he had one available! 

My copy is made of wenge with olive wood picking out the corners. I’ve waxed lyrical about Scott’s craftsmanship a few times in the past and this puzzle is no exception to that rule. The fit is that good that Gill was convinced it was actually a box or a solid block – there is no clue to where the first piece is going to come out at all, and given this is a Coffin design, you’re not going to find it easily and it’s probably going to involve some sort of a strange Vulcan grip. Visual inspection is totally pointless given Scott’s fine craftsmanship, so I reverted to a methodical fondling to find something that might move...

 

Like Involute, there’s a key piece, slightly more oddly shaped on this puzzle and removing it allows one or two other bits to move, which in turn allows some funky stuff to happen. The family resemblance between Involute and Involution is hard to miss – there’s a really interesting section a little way in where both will let you have plenty of movement, without any pieces looking like they’re going to come free ... and Burr Tools won’t help with either of them! :-)  If anything, the funky bit in the middle is slightly simpler on Involution than on Involute – and perhaps that’s why the great man favoured the latter.

The first time I took Involution apart it really felt like a voyage of discovery – each successive move was incredibly well disguised – the fit is that good that the pieces cling together and don’t move at all, until you find the right places to put pressure on the assembly to get something moving. This puzzle doesn’t give up its secrets easily and the combinations of movements required, and indeed the rotations required keep things interesting. 

Some designs begin giving up their secrets more and more rapidly as you progress – somehow this design doesn’t do that and it continues to force you to think and analyse the possibilities right through to the end ... in fact, there’s a spot about halfway through where you’ve already removed four pieces, but there’s no clue at all as to where to look for the next piece to come off ... and Scott’s work is that good, that even the last two pieces stay solidly together until you work out what the two shapes are and how they come apart.

Another cracking Coffin design expertly crafted by Scott Peterson – thanks Scott!

Slow Waltz

I was really looking forward to getting my grubby paws on Eric Fuller’s version of Jeff Namkung’s Slow Waltz. I’d played around with a couple of Jeff’s designs courtesy of Richard Gain’s Shapeways versions and found the designs were excellent, so the prospect of getting my hands on a beautifully crafted wooden version was more than a bit tempting. 

My copy is made of sapele and macassar ebony and lives up to Eric’s normal exacting standards. The two woods give a bit of a clue to the shapes of the pieces – but don’t really make it too easy, after all this is a level 14.8 puzzle, so there’s quite a lot of business to be done before you can release any pieces at all – and it stays interesting pretty much all the way through to the end, with the last two pieces not exactly falling apart either. 

The puzzle starts with an almost complete 4*4*4 cube – there’s a cubie missing from one of the faces. From there you start by opening things up a bit and making some room so that you can get some of the more useful bits moving around – there are a couple of really unusual moves that might evade you for a while, depending on how you grip this puzzle. I discovered a couple of blind alleys during the disassembly (and several more on the assembly!). It’s a fun puzzle to sit and resolve as the movements do seem quite choreographed with things first going one way, and then the other. 

It may only have five pieces, but this is a really good design ... for ages I found myself stumped on working out how to introduce one particular piece because the “obvious” way to do it turns out to be less than useless. This is probably the cube that I’ve had to take apart and reassemble the most in order to get to know it – it’s a great little challenge.

...now if only I can get myself to stop counting 1-2-3 ...   

   1-2-3 ...                           

as I'm taking it apart...

[Kevin's written about his thoughts on the Slow Waltz in this post.] 

Wil Strijbos' First Box

One of Wil Strijbos’ recent emails contained a couple of new puzzles: a new variant of an impossible dovetail joint and a blue box that sort-of resembled a tardis from Doctor Who – called First Box.

First Box as you might expect from the name was the first puzzle box that Wil designed many moons ago. When I visited Wil last year, he'd pointed out a black and aluminium box on one of the puzzle shelves that housed several other Strijbos originals and he'd mentioned that it was his first puzzle box and that he was hoping to have some produced in the future. He wanted to give me a shot at it, but sadly whoever had played with it last hadn't locked it up properly, so it was placed back on the shelf...

Since then Wil has taken the opportunity to improve on the design (read: make it harder!) and has also found a neat solution to an aspect that concerned him about the original version. The original came with a separate tool - which bothered Wil a bit - so he toyed with the idea of not including it and suggesting that puzzlers make a trip to their local hardware store and buy whatever tool they thought might be useful to get into the box - however recurring nightmares of puzzlers merrily heading off to their local ironmonger and purchasing a large hammer stopped him from trying that. So the new design dispenses with the external tool... :-)

Father and son

My copy arrived literally days after I’d ordered it and first impressions were that this was a really heavy little puzzle – it’s very clearly not a box with a lot of space inside it … which probably means that it has a lot of gubbins inside there making sure that it stays locked closed. The lid has very little play in it to start with and has a large nut screwed into the top of it. The front of the box has Wil’s signature and a production number in the bottom right hand corner. There’s a small dark hole in the middle of the back of the box and a hole in the bottom that lets you see a small steel cylinder – which Wil has helpfully told us we are to get out of the box – although rather unhelpfully, that hole in the bottom of the box is too small to allow the cylinder out…

OK, so you have a seemingly impenetrable blue anodised box – you can see the lid has a little bit of play in it – there’s one obvious thing to try, so you do, and that’s not spectacularly useful, so you think for a while and explore a few more avenues before finding what one might loosely call “some tools”. Trying out various things with the tools you’ve discovered leads to some further discoveries – among them that sometimes the lid of the box feels a bit looser, sometimes there is a pin across that hole in the base, and sometimes there’s a pin across another hole.

First First Box opening

Wil’s helpfully told us in his email that there are no magnets and that no bashing is required – yet I suspect that most folks will be tempted to try that, if only a little every now and then…

During the course of your explorations you can start piecing together some of what must be going on inside there – part of the clues come from the sounds inside when you tilt the box this way and that – but the confusing thing is that those sounds don’t always appear to behave the same way! [Pixies!]

Add in the interaction of the tilting with the use of those tools and there is more than enough to try and keep track of – and if I’m honest – the first time I opened the box there was more luck than skill involved and I ended up spending a long time examining the innards to work out what I was doing… and then even longer to work out why my method actually works! (There’s something a little disturbing about finding a method that works absolutely reliably- but realising that theoretically it really shouldn’t work …and it took me a couple of days to work that one out!)

Solved!

This is a really good little sequential discovery puzzle – the tools are nicely hidden; the internal mechanism makes it virtually impossible to fluke a solution – the machining is really superb so everything fits beautifully (and slides around like steel on wet ice) … but once you’ve worked it out, everything is totally predictable – definitely a well-behaved puzzle – doesn’t leave anything to chance and doesn’t let you do anything you can’t undo … although I realise that until you’ve opened it, you might disagree with one or both of those wild allegations!

[And you don't have to take just my word for it - you can read what Jerry thought about it over here...] 

Some random bits and bobs

The last time I visited James Dalgety, he was having a bit of a clear-out and had put aside a bunch of puzzles in some plastic crates for swap or sale, including a special crate of interesting items to be offered on a future puzzle auction – those were well beyond my financial reach on the day! (I hadn’t ever seen a new-in-box Panex Gold Puzzle before … didn’t think they still existed …)

After I’d done a sweep of the duplicate books shelf and picked up some interesting titles and half of a set of Cubism For Fun magazines*, I turned my attention to the swaps boxes and picked through a veritable treasure trove. I seemed to keep stumbling across things I recognised as being rather special, from my puzzle-reading and it would have been very easy to spend a whole lot more.

I picked up three rather interesting little puzzles that afternoon.

Peppermint Twist was John Ergatoudis’ IPP17 Exchange Puzzle. Reminiscent of a twisted sugar cane, this is a sweet little puzzle. (Sorry, I’ll behave.) It consists of four twisted steel strands that fit together to make a stable, neat structure … as long as the pieces are in the right place.

Starting from the solved position, it soon becomes totally clear that the only way to get these pieces apart is to slide one of them out the end by twisting it out of the bundle, and once the first one is out, sliding the next one out is easier, and soon enough you’ll have four twisted bits of metal that all look rather similar.

Reassembly isn’t totally straight-forward as there are a number of ways of putting three strands together that look pretty good only to find that the last one won’t engage… and there are some almost-solutions that leave the last piece so tight that you may well damage something in the process of trying to slot it back in … but when you find just the right combination, the last piece slides in ever-so-gently, just like it was meant to.

A fun puzzle to fiddle absent-mindedly with…

I first spotted a copy of the Perplexity puzzle on Rob Stegmann’s mammoth web-site and thought it looked neat, so when I found a copy in the swaps-bin I put it on one side.

According to Edward Hordern’s Sliding Piece Puzzles book (acquired from James on an earlier visit) these puzzles were the subject of a 1900 patent and have been produced in several forms over the years.  Rob’s collection includes several variations on the theme in his section on Sliding Block Puzzles.

The one I got is a pretty tidy example of the main variant that was first produced in 1919 – I’m not sure exactly when this copy dates back to – but it’s almost certainly just become the oldest puzzle in my little collection, by a very long way!

The letters slide up and down the main track, with a couple of branch lines permitting a bit of storage and shuffling space and the aim of the puzzle is to spell out PERPLEXITY along the main track – first backwards, then forwards. 

My first thoughts were that it wasn’t tremendously difficult as a puzzle because there’s a fair amount of space on the sidelines and there are a couple of pairs of letters that are interchangeable – however I’d totally missed a couple of subtleties about the buttons and totally failed to understand why sometimes there seemed to be a lot more space to work with than other times ... and I only discovered those after reading Edward Hordern’s notes on this little puzzle...

It’s a cute little historical artefact that’s survived many years so far – I’ll try and keep it going for a bit longer… 

[Jerry wrote about his copy over here if you're interested in some more thoughts...] 

My third interesting little find in the swap-boxes was a copy of Allan Boardman’s IPP13 exchange puzzle – a Circular Tangram. At about two inches across it’s a dinky little puzzle, as you might expect from the chap whose burrs are usually measured in single-digit millimetres across. It’s a maple tray with a set of tangram pieces resting in it –and when I first had a look at the pieces I assumed they were some sort of thin acrylic sheet – they’re only about 1.64 mm thick and are black as night. 

I was somewhat embarrassed when a bit more research on t’internet informed me that the pieces were in fact finely cut ebony – wow – of course I then added to the embarrassment by admitting this to one or two more experienced puzzlers who had a good laugh at the fact that I could have thought mister Boardman would have used acrylic – I mean, really! <Blush>

* … and since then I’ve been in touch with Rik van Grol at the Nederlandse Kubus Club and managed to purchase copies of all of the other Cubism For Fun back issues that I was missing, so I now also have a complete set of (the English editions of) those magazines as well – plenty reading lies ahead.

Stickman Milestone Puzzle

...Some say he dreams about new puzzles and when he wakes up in the morning there’s a working prototype in his workshop.

...Some say he can fix broken puzzles by the power of thought alone and that he once suggested that Stewart Coffin look into using rhombic dodecahedrons.

All we know is, he’s called the Stick (man)!

With thanks and apologies to Top Gear.

Robert Yarger’s latest creation has been dubbed the Milestone Puzzle – and it certainly is a milestone in so many senses:

•  it celebrates a decade of Stickman Puzzles,
• passing the 1000^th Stickman Puzzle produced
• it’s the 25^th numbered Stickman Puzzle, and
• it’s an incredible mechanical achievement.

Rob teased us with some pics of his latest work-in-progress on the Renegade Puzzlers Forum back in February and it’s probably fair to say that it created a fair amount of interest. He showed us pictures of a half completed framework with all manner of interesting-looking gears, screws and gadgets – and a chain, made of wood(!).

Roll forward a couple of months and I’d taken Rob up on his offer of a puzzle and been tracking it’s progress from Oklahoma to Barnt Green ... en route it was intercepted by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs who duly sent me a ransom demand (or VAT invoice if you prefer) a few days ago. Yesterday I managed to get up to the Parcel Force depot to pay the ransom and get my package released ... and then I had an absolutely brilliant time exploring Rob’s latest masterpiece.

For starters, this isn’t a small puzzle – the basic premise is that you need to solve the puzzle in order to open the framework that cocoons (read: securely locks in place!) the commemorative Stickman Milestone Puzzle Book inside. The cover of the framework has the most amazing set of interconnected mechanics I’ve ever seen: the left hand side has a drive shaft with two different sorts of screw thread – one of which in turn drives a set of helical gears and the other, via a couple of sprockets, drives a chain to transfer the movement to a secondary shaft in the centre ... but the more that you examine the mechanism, the more it perplexes.

There are a couple of bits that appear to be driven at different speeds by that drive shaft – except they’re quite firmly connected ... most of the gears and other bits have a little bit of play in them, but for quite a while, I couldn’t work out what was stopping them all from moving – I could see that they were interconnected, and thanks to the open nature of the framework, you can see almost everything.

I’d poked and prodded for a while before I started investigating a bit more widely and then stumbled across what I’d been missing up to now and all of a sudden a whole new world of opportunities opened up to me and I had my first opportunity to exercise the mechanics of this beauty – and it is absolutely mesmerising watching the various gears and sliders interacting to produce some rather unusual moments in the one half, while that chain drives the secondary shaft in the other half – the mechanics are staggering – how the heck they were first conceived is well beyond me, but the skills required to implement them are truly mind-blowing.

Playing with the mechanics is fun and can be a little instructive as things that were hidden at the start make their appearance and you wonder to yourself if that might just be useful later on – I found myself trying little experiments to try and isolate bits of the machine so that I could improve my understanding of how they were all interconnected – or not – and what was actually stopping the frame from opening, and then working back to what was stopping that from happening and so on – it must have taken the best part of an hour to work out the basic gist of the machine and then start actually trying to unlock it, and a few times I came close, but not quite close enough – until I spotted something else I’d been missing all along, and that was the final little piece in the jigsaw – although executing it all still took a while, but eventually I had released the catches and opened the frame to allow the book to be released.

Job done!

Well, not quite – actually the book itself is a puzzle too! The spine is beautifully crafted in wood (what else, right?) and has three arms locked into it that cover the front and the back – and they are in turn joined on the right hand side by a pair of cross-pieces that are pegged together ... and it took me another little while to force myself to think of this as yet another Stickman Puzzle – after which I managed to work out how to get into it... and there is treasure within the book.

Rob and Matt Dawson have pulled together a lovely book giving the background to Rob’s journey from hobbyist to puzzle-making rock star (my phrase – I think Rob’s far too humble to refer to himself that way). It was really interesting to read about how Rob started out making puzzle boxes with a single radial-arm saw (a.k.a. widow-maker) and how he still chooses to use it for all sorts of strange, unintended jobs today. It was nice to read about his early collaboration with Eric Fuller and their Camelot period (great description, by the way!) and to get Rob’s perspective on how he designs his puzzles. One thing that really attracted me to Rob’s puzzles was the fact that they’re all so totally different from one another – it’s hard to look at one of them and see a family resemblance to any of the other puzzles he’s produced – apart from the style of the work, perhaps – so it was interesting to read that Rob has always actively avoided making anything that looks like anything else already out there in puzzle-dom, and that sort of explains it all – his work really is unique.

The second part of the book contains descriptions and pictures of every Stickman Puzzle produced to date (and even obscures the details of his Apothecary Chest drawer so as not to spoil it for any of the other participants!) including details of the production runs and even a set of high level solutions to every puzzle. After that there’s a section on some of the prototypes or ideas that haven’t quite made it out into the wild yet ... all of which shows that having reached these milestones 10/25/1000 there’s still a lot left in the tank!

Here’s hoping that Robert Yarger, aka Stickman, will carry on adding beautifully crafted highly original puzzles to this list for ages to come.

Thank you Rob – truly a Milestone Puzzle to celebrate and enjoy!

[and thanks Matt for pestering him into producing the book and then doing all the editing – great job!]

That’s impossible!!

I give you the first impossible object that I’ve added to my collection – a pair of playing cards from Angus Lavery ... and a little story behind them. 

Back at Easter, down in Devon, at James Dalgety’s Easter Puzzle Party, I met an interesting fellow by the name of John Lavery. John is the current organiser of the monthly gatherings of puzzlers and magicians at Camden Lock (2nd Tuesday of the month – shout if you want the details!) since Ray Bathke stepped down after organising them for several years. I’d seen his name on the regular emails, but since I haven’t managed to get down to one of the Camden Lock do’s yet, I hadn’t actually met him. 

My introduction to John came as he was showing a couple of us an album he’d put together to showcase brother Angus’ incredible card-folding skills ... he was flicking through the album and taking the odd card out and passing them around for closer inspection while he was telling stories about the designs: Angus came up with this one in about fifteen minutes after Christmas dinner one year – he disappeared into the kitchen and came out with this – as he held up a complicated set of about five interconnected cards, each with its own impossible fold, yet somehow appearing rather solidly interlinked with the others.  

 

Some would be dismissed with a comment about the particular design losing quite a lot of material, so they don’t look as impressive – and others would have something rather subtle about them that needed pointing out – at least to the largely uninitiated, like myself. I’d come across impossible card-folding a couple of times on my trawling around the internet – seen some pictures (mainly trapdoor cards) and had to look at some of them a couple of times before I realised what the impossible bit was (told you I was a philistine!). 

I’d also come across a chapter in one of my puzzle books [Puzzlers Tribute – A Feast for the Mind] on impossible card-folding by Luc de Smet – and it showed how to create one class of impossible card, but apart from that, my research (read: surfing!) has turned up very little else. From what I can gather, the basic rules of impossible card-folding are: cutting and folding is allowed – rejoining anything isn’t, so if it looks like it’s joined, it always has been...

Anyway, back to John’s tour through Angus’ body of work – and there’s one card in there that is totally mind-blowing: a standard sized playing card with the Olympic Rings cut and folded so that each ring is half cut-out and half folded-over card – except that all five rings are interlinked wherever they overlap! Remember the rules? No rejoining, ever ... John told us that this is one of Angus' harder designs and it has a non-trivial failure rate – and looking at just how little material is left to keep the two halves of the rings together, and trying to imagine the amount of folding and turning inside out that these cards have to go through to get those rings interlinked – that’s hardly surprising! 

 

A couple of days later I got in touch with Angus and asked if there was any chance he’d be prepared to make up a couple for me as “Thank-you”s for a pair of puzzlers who’ve been rather kind to me, and who already have every-puzzling-thing that I could imagine trying to give them – and I was very chuffed (and quite a bit surprised – after all he didn’t know me from Adam and I was expecting a reaction more along the lines of “I’d rather stick pins in my eye than go through that again”) when he agreed ... and a few weeks later I received a well-packaged set of little picture frames from Angus: three of his incredible Olympic Ring cards and a copy of his very first impossible card design.

I’ve sat and stared at these cards for ages, and I reckon I’m no closer to understanding how the heck they work than when I first saw one in John’s album at Easter – truly impossible objects – courtesy of Angus Lavery’s incredible card-folding wizardry!

[Oh, and in case you’re wondering – they loved them! Thanks Angus!  :-) ] 

Postscript: my mate Oli has had a go at playing around with creating some of his own - have a look over here! Nice one Oli!!

IPP31 Berlin puzzle

I spotted this puzzle in one of Wil Strijbos’ emails a couple of weeks ago and asked about it because it looked quite unusual and really stood out. Turns out it was made as a gift for the organisers of IPP31 in Berlin from Markus Götz and hadn't been offered for sale. However, there had been so many requests for the puzzle from folks who'd seen them or heard about them in the interim that Wil had managed to talk Jean-Claude Constantin into running off a few more copies for him ... and a couple of weeks ago, one was headed in my direction and several more accompanied Wil across to MPP6 – and didn’t quite make it home with him…

From the pictures I’d seen, it looked like a variation of the Kugellager puzzles with a lot of extra attention being paid to the presentation with a large “IPP31” overlaid on “Berlin” cut into the slider, along with the extra detailing on the edge of the slider – it really looks nice and J-CC has clearly thought a lot about how to integrate these aspects into the puzzle itself. Frankly, if that had been the end of it, and this was effectively just a prettier version of a Kugellager, I’d have been quite happy … but that’s not the end of it at all. Not by a long shot!

When you start playing with this puzzle, you have five balls at the top of the letters and a set of corresponding holes to get the balls out of – presumably the goal. It’s pretty obvious that there’s going to be an element of a Gray-code-ish sequence required to move the balls around as the tracks in the slider interfere with tracks in the base plate – and the latter only get revealed as you progress, so it’s not immediately obvious which way you should be heading to achieve some of your interim goals.

A few moves in you realise the first of the little twists in this puzzle: you cannot rely on tipping it one way sliding in or out, and then tipping it the other way, as you can with the Kugellagers - because they’re well-behaved sequence puzzles – and this one isn’t! There are quite a few areas in the puzzle where you won’t immediately notice that you have a couple of balls moving at the same time and it’s not that helpful if both of them move in the same direction.

Introduce the first twist: DEXTERITY. You’re going to have to pay careful attention and find a way to get the balls to go into the right channels and you’ll need a bit of dexterity to do that every now and then … now before you hold that against this puzzle, I’m not a fan of dexterity puzzles at all, and I don’ think this angle gets in the way of enjoying this puzzle at all – it adds just the right level of extra care to keep you on your toes and slow you down from time to time.

Progress a bit further and you come across the next big difference from the Kugellagers: CHAOS!

Okay, not quite chaos, but certainly far less predictability than the Kugellagers which have a neatly laid out set of paths that interact in a predictable manner – this puzzle, because of the letters on one half of the tracks, totally removes that predictability – so there is no chance of getting into a groove and executing a predictable set of moves to progress – which makes it very easy to go back on yourself quite a bit without really realising it.

The other little bit of chaos comes from not knowing which ball you’re trying to release first – and it isn’t obvious – I got caught out when at one point all of a sudden I noticed I was quite close to releasing one of the balls.

As you release each ball you give yourself a little more freedom to work on the others and it becomes easier and easier to release the balls as you work your way through, until the final ball pops out and you’re able to slide the BERLIN piece all the way out.  Victory!

Well not really…

At this point you probably realise something rather important – getting them out is relatively easy – getting back to the start is the tricky part! You’ve started from a known “good” position, but going back, you can pop those little balls back in almost any order at virtually any time in the process (there’s usually a track available on most of the holes) – however not all of those combinations will actually allow you to get back to the starting position, which gives us the final twist on this puzzle: GETTING BACK IS HARD!

You’ll probably have a vague recollection of which ones came out more or less when - and that’ll help you – but you’re going to need to work hard to get back to the start – and it won’t be a simple pattern that you can get into the groove with – and there’ll be times when you’ll need a bit of that dexterity as well. In short – it’s a sod!

I like this puzzle because it sucked me in with a false sense of security that I’d seen something similar before and I thought I had it sussed, only to realise that it had a lot more in stall for me – if you like puzzles like that, get in touch with Wil – last time I checked he still had a few of these kicking around.

Chen’s Six Board Burr #2

Designed by Chi-Ren Chen, this innocuous-looking board burr has a couple of interesting little twists to it. 

A few months ago Eric posted some early pics of his prototypes on his Facebook page and there was a chorus of approval from the peanut gallery – while all the approval was going on he wondered aloud whether he should make the pieces with splined ends for some added strength, and a whole lot of extra good looks. Several of us piled in and encouraged him to add splines, even though they’d invariably add a little to the cost – and probably quite a bit of extra work! :-)

A couple of days later a splined version appeared and it was indeed rather a good-looking piece of work ... in the interests of science, Eric then went and slung a 45 lbs weight on the one end of it and posted a picture of this poor little innocent puzzle piece with a massive lump of iron trying to rip it apart – and the piece held its own – so the point was made, the splined version of the burr is pretty darn strong! 

My copy arrived with the other recent batch from Cubic Dissection neatly disassembled in a little plastic baggy – gee thanks! The pieces are made of walnut, ash and African mahogany, with the splines each on a contrasting wood. 

Eric’s description notes that it’s a level 2.14.12 burr that is “more approachable than the level may seem” – the level is rather odd really, with the assembled puzzle shedding its first pieces after a mere two moves, while the next piece takes 14 moves to release, and a further 12 are required to get the next one off before it becomes a trivial matter. 

Eric’s encouragement is well-placed – if you were to bash the pieces into BurrTools and look for a solution, you might be disappointed – because, as PuzzleWillBePlayed.com notes, rotations are required... so you have no choice really! 

I had a look at the pieces, decided that the colours needed to be together in pairs (huge logical leap me? – Nah, that’s what Eric’s pics show!) – Handily, there are two identical pairs of pieces which makes placement in the solution a lot simpler ... and there’s a piece that would work quite nicely at the end to give that first two-move piece-removal, while actually locking everything else together, so I’d more or less decided where the pieces needed to go with that little thought process alone – in fact, if you add one further constraint: don’t waste space as you go, you can pretty much find a unique target assembly – the tricky bit is then just to work out how to get there.  

I started fiddling around fairly aimlessly and found that the tolerances between the pieces were pretty incredible – when you’re assembling board burrs you’re invariably sliding one piece over a set of other pieces – and if you don’t have all the pieces properly aligned and absolutely square, you’re not going to get anything to move ... so much for the comment on PuzzleWillBePlayed.com that if the edges are rounded, short-cuts are possible. No short-cuts are possible on Eric’s version!

I started with one pair of pieces and pretty much used those as a frame of reference all the way through – while trying to work out how to get the other three pieces into their places in order to allow the last piece to be inserted the way I’m guessing it has to ... that process took a fair amount of trial and error as well as experimentation to work out what order they needed to go in and how you could manipulate them in order to free up the space to do what you need to do next. 

If you’re more used to playing with well-behaved orthogonal burrs, that process can all seem rather unstructured and chaotic, but combined with Eric’s fine tolerances, you always know when something is supposed to work (it fits, just) and when it shouldn’t... 

In the end, it probably took me the best part of an hour to suss out the order, orientation and then the manoeuvres required to construct it – and I was actually rather chuffed with myself for managing that given that it’s way outside of my usual comfort zone. 

It’s a fun little burr that looks like it should be really simple, but it’ll definitely provide plenty of amusement for almost every puzzler. 

Eric has produced a gorgeous version to fantastic tolerances – and the splines really make this one stand out

Stellated Improved Square Face puzzle

Back in March this year Scott Peterson caused a fair amount of excitement on the Renegade Puzzlers Forum when he posted a video of a modification he’d come up with to Stewart Coffin’s Improved Square Face puzzle. The video explains that Scott had been toying with Coffin’s Improved Square face and changed the shapes of the ends of the sticks and come up with a totally different looking puzzle, dubbed the Stellated Improved Square Face (SISF). 

The video demonstrates how the Improved Square Face (ISF) is a development of the standard Diagonal Burr (“Coffinising” it and making it a far more interesting puzzle than the standard Diagonal Burr) , and SISF is in turn a stellation of the ISF – hence SISF.  

Quite a few of us expressed an interest in the SISF if Scott got around to making a few for sale, so I was delighted a few months later when I had an email from Scott to say that in spite of his hectic travel schedule he’d managed to put a few of these SISFs together and asked if I was still interested. The email included some absolutely gorgeous pictures of the puzzle in a variety of different combinations of exotic woods and it didn’t take long to settle on a bocote and African blackwood copy – which luckily was still available – in fact Scott had made two copies in those woods and the second one has ended up ten minutes down the road at Chris’ place! Small world, eh?

The puzzle arrived pretty soon after the usual PayPal exchange and if anything, it is even more gorgeous in the flesh. The woods Scott has used are tremendous and as usual, the fit between the pieces is simply astonishing – with the puzzle assembled, you cannot see any seams or joins!

Playing around with it you’ll find that it can slide apart on a few different axes – turning it into a pair of assemblies each made up of three dissimilar pieces ... and taking those apart in turn can either provide a serially interlocking assembly, or a co-ordinated motion assembly depending on how you separated the initial structure ... I think that’s right – or at least, that’s how it seems to me!

Assembly from six scrambled pieces is decidedly non-trivial!

When I took my copy along to our last Midlands Puzzle Party it drew plenty of admiring looks and more than a few highly favourable comments – and Chris commented on something that I hadn’t noticed – Scott has even thought to take off the sharp tips on the ends of the stick so that they don’t poke holes in things, like desks and unwary puzzlers! 

A beautiful modification to a classic design gives us a lovely new puzzle – courtesy of Scott Peterson’s fine mind and superb craftsmanship ... or as I put it to him on the forum: “Good mod that man!”.

Coolen Creations

When Louis spent the weekend at my place for MPP6 and the Puzzle Braai, he gave me a pair of puzzles he’d made himself. I was aware that he’d started making some puzzle of his own recently, and had begun spending his puzzle budget on puzzle-creation devices (aka power tools) rather than on buying puzzles themselves. And I know he’s taking this resolution seriously because in the run-up to MPP6 not a single package arrived on my doorstep addressed to Louis!

The Burr

The first puzzle he gave me was a little oak six-piece burr – thoughtfully disassembled (!) and in a little plastic baggy. I had a quick glance at it and noticed two things, and at least one of them scared me:

• One of the pieces has a couple of blind corners on it, and
• The pieces are lop-sided, so the legs are going to be different lengths.

Now one of those would have made it rather difficult to manufacture, and the other will make it rather hard to solve … I had a little bit of a fiddle around with it on the Friday evening and decided that the only way it was going together was with the help of BurrTools – but I wouldn’t resort to that yet, and certainly not in front of the man who’d made it and just given it to me – that could be seen as rude.

I took it along to MPP6 the next day and at one point Chris picked it up and asked about it, so I told him all I knew – it was a short interchange. Louis pricked up his ears and a little while after Chris had started fiddling around with it, he asked which burr it was and Louis answered that he was sure he’d recognise it – Chris protested a little and then Louis announced that he knew that Chris had one … which was just the clue he needed and it was assembled pretty quickly after that.

Turns out that Chris had deduced that for Louis to have been able to make that statement quite as categorically as he did, it would have to be a fairly well-known burr that everyone knew he had … and that possibly narrows it down to a reasonable number including a pair of aluminium burrs that Wil had been selling – and this was indeed one of them – Peter Marineau’s Piston Burr.

…so for his first ever attempt at making a burr, Louis has fabricated an oak Piston burr with offset arms… the latter a result of having made the sticks a bit too long to actually assemble them (one of the moves requires a piece to go around an end) so he added a feature in the form of a short arm and a long arm on each piece, giving the resultant burr a jaunty offset – and confusing and intimidating unwary puzzlers, like this one. 

The Box

On a previous visit Louis had brought along a puzzle box that he’d made with only the most basic of tools – and it was a pretty good idea. A few folks had a bash at it and they were all complimentary and helpfully suggested some ideas for improvements when Louis began talking about his own ideas for developing the box further – some of those relied on some additional hardware (he’d already rationalised the need for a router without any help from us!) and ideas were thrown around and played with…

This time Louis arrived with his A-MAZING Box #3. The name is a play on one of his forum handles and the mechanism inside, and came courtesy of Wil, who named it after receiving #2 from Louis. On the outside it looks like a fairly nondescript box – on the inside, there lies evil.

I first started playing with it on the Friday evening before MPP6 – and got virtually nowhere, so I hatched a sneaky plan and took it along to MPP6 in the hopes that someone might open it and I might get a clue to it’s mechanism … it was a great plan, and at various times during the day I got my hopes up when I spotted Wil and Chris playing around with it, however, the box remained locked tight. Uh oh!

The following weekend I sat down and had a serious bash at opening it, and it must have taken me about an hour – and I think it’s excellent! It gives a little feedback, and even having seen its predecessors, I’d totally over complicated things in my mind. While I was working on it I noticed that the bottom panel would move from time to time, so I developed a fixation on that for a while … and yes, I even tried spinning it and blowing into it – but I did not attempt to drown it! There are limits…

This puzzle has clearly been designed by someone who knows how puzzlers think – and he has used this against you all the way through – building in quite a few dead ends along the path to eternal happiness, or at least an open puzzle box, as the case may be … gosh I’m really glad (NOT!) that I mentioned that to him when he was here last time. He’s been more than a little cruel on some of those branches and forces you to eventually do what you really don’t want to do – it’s a really clever design – one of the things I put to him in an email after I’d opened it was “Heaven help us if you ever decide to take this seriously!”.

Louis has definitely put his new power tools to very good use and come up with a great little puzzle box.

Thanks Louis – there’s a special spot on my puzzle box shelf for this one now.

Stickman Checkmate Puzzlebox

Back in November last year I wrote about my visit to Wil Strijbos’ place just before the Dutch Cube Day in Eindhoven, and I mentioned that Wil had blown my mind when he waltzed into the kitchen with a copy of a Stickman Checkmate Box – blown my mind because this was the puzzle that I’d most lusted after. Ever. Bar none. 

But that was actually only half of the story – and now I can tell you the other half, but let me take a small step back first…

The first time I can remember seeing Stickman boxes was when I was trawling through the puzzle gallery on Cubic Dissection a few years ago. They all pretty much grabbed my imagination, but the one that really stood out, so much so that I actually dragged Gill over to show her some pictures of it, was the Checkmate Box. The description of a hidden mechanism moving the pieces to unlock a box sounded almost like the Mechanical Turk of yore – and seeing one made entirely of wood – including all the gears and internal mechanisms just totally fried my brain. Sadly however, Rob had only made 26 of them back in 2007 and they were all long gone! When they were first put on the market, their price was reasonable given the amount of work that must have gone into making them, and since then they’ve changed hands for increasingly larger and larger amounts on the usual puzzle auctions.

I’d watched a couple of them drift past the price I thought I could afford to pay for them only to resolve to keep an eye out for the next one each time…

Flash forward to Wil’s kitchen where I’m standing playing with the Stickman #2 Box and he walks in with a Checkmate Box – and it’s absolutely gorgeous. When I regain the power of speech, I tell him some of this background and the fact that this is the absolute pinnacle of puzzle boxes as far as I’m concerned … and in that earlier post I said he’d blown my mind, but I didn’t quite get to the really mind-blowing part: Wil looks at me and says he has a spare copy – disappears for a minute and returns with a large cardboard box, still sealed, addressed to William Strijbos from one Robert Yarger … it seems he’d decided to buy two of them in case a collector wanted one.

He asks me if I’d like it, and the only thing that stops me from saying “Absolutely!! Yes, please!!” is the thought that he could get thousands for this if he put it on the right auction – so I give it a cautious “Sure I’d love it but how much would you like for it” – he wants what he paid for it … which leaves me totally conflicted! I don’t have that much lying around to spend on a single puzzle – and won’t until my bonus gets paid - in six months time and I know he can get several times that on an auction (I might have mentioned that a few times to him as well!). So I explain my situation to him and he says in that case “You take it now, and pay me later”(!). But I can’t do that to him, so we agree that he’ll hang onto it until I have the cash spare, and then he’ll ship it over to me.

Six months later I send Wil some money and he ships the box over – in the interim I’ve watched Rob Yarger facilitate an auction of a complete collection of Stickmen and the Checkmate box goes for a very pretty penny! So before I send Wil the money, I check that he’s still happy with the price and tell him that I think he’s undercharging me for this work of art – but he won’t hear of it – the original price stands.

Sadly at this point the Post Office gets in the way a bit and the tracking shows the parcel in the UK, but not being delivered, for a couple of weeks – during which time the Dutch post office tells Wil there’s a problem with the address. There isn’t.

I worry a little bit that after all this time the Post Office is going to do something silly and the little treasure chest is going to disappear into a black hole somewhere… but about 4 weeks later it turns up back at Wil’s place, seemingly none the worse for wear, with a note saying there was no-one home – which is odd because there wasn’t ever a note through the door… but the parcel is safe.

Wil posts it back a couple of weeks later, when he’s in town and I’m not on holiday – and this time it gets to my house in a couple of days. At this stage I’m pretty excited and cut open the packaging with my trusty Swann-Morton #4, only to find that the trips back and forwards have taken a toll on the box, which is now in more pieces than it really ought to be – nothing’s broken, just come apart at the glue seams – and I’m hovering somewhere between agony and ecstasy and not sure where to settle – I finally have the box I’ve wanted for years, except it’s in bits in my hands (OK, just 5 bits).

I jot off a quick email to Wil to let him know what’s happened and he immediately offers to bring his copy along when he comes over, we’ll swap, and he’ll get the other one repaired … what a gentleman! I decline, because I’d already been in touch with Robert Yarger and described what had happened and how it looked to the untrained eye – and he’d responded right away with three long emails containing detailed photographs and instructions on exactly what to do to put it all back together again – another absolute gent!

From the email exchange with Rob, it transpired he’d hedged his bets a bit on the final assembly of these boxes, thinking that the complexity of the innards might mean he’d need to get back in there at some point in the future if anything went wrong, so he’d deliberately made the final assembly joint a fairly weak glue joint – and that was what had given way while my box was in transit … and exactly the same thing had happened to another one – ironically, the only thing he’s ever had to think about putting back together on these mechanical marvels has been the weak joint he introduced in case he had to get back inside. They can take quite a beating, but it seems the Post Office is far more ‘enthusiastic’ than most puzzlers!

Sod’s Law then dictates that I don’t have enough spare time to get it all back together again before Wil’s visit / MPP6 – but the extra two days over the past long weekend gave me enough time to work through Rob’s emails methodically, test that I had everything working properly, commit to glueing (commitment is always the hardest part, I find) and then tie it all up while the glue dries.

The grin was pretty broad when I untied it the next evening and it all held, and the drawers all move the way they should – and it looks absolutely stunning once more.

Given the process I’ve been through, I didn’t really get to solve the puzzle – but the mechanics are every bit as impressive as I’d imagined they were. Playing with twisting the box backwards and forwards and seeing the pieces move, properly, is quite something! Coming up with a pair of Checkmate positions, one for either side, from the same starting position, using those internal wooden(!) mechanics, is staggering – quite literally.

This one has a very special place in my collection, not just because it is a mechanical marvel that shows off some incredible engineering and craftsmanship, but because of the story of how it came to be in my collection.

Thanks Rob for the advice, instructions and encouragement,

…and Thank you Wil – I think I will be in your debt for quite some time.