IPP33 - Day 3 - Hakone...

After having breakfast with Rob Hegge I spend a little while in the lobby catching up on emails before Scott Elliott arrives with a bunch of his printed puzzles and we explore them for a while (I manage to assemble them all, much to my own amusement!) before I rather rudely excuse myself, dash upstairs for my bag and sprint off to the waiting buses outside the hotel... today we're heading for Hakone, aka Puzzle Mountain - for some serious puzzle box shopping.

I find myself next to Stan Isaacs and really enjoy the bus ride getting to know a wonderful gent and a terrific puzzler. I pass him a copy of Cast Cylinder and my little yellow burr and they amuse him for a while as we travel through increasingly more beautiful (and less urban) countryside until we eventually climb up a steep, winding mountain pass and crest the ridge before dropping down into the picturesque town of Hakone.

While the bus is parking we spot Frank Potts with Brian and Sue Young waiting outside what turns out to be a shop most of us will recognise from their web-shop - Izumiya. My first thought is that given the head start that the three of them have had, they've probably hoovered up all the best stuff, although spotting a 3 foot kumiki robot in the shop later on makes me doubt that, as I know at least one of them kind of likes kumiki puzzles!

Before we're allowed off the bus the house-rules for puzzle-buying during the first half an hour are explained to ensure that everyone gets a fair chance to buy something special - being a wimp I hang back from what I'm assuming will be some heavily competitive shopping inside and spend some time looking through Mine's stall set up outside the shop. I pick up quite a few puzzles from Mine that end up becoming some of the puzzles I spend the most time on during my stay in Japan ... and a copy of his Design Competition entry for this year, only I don't realise it at the time. 

Once the rush has subsided I venture inside and find a throng of puzzlers at the back of the shop (the front of the store has everything imaginable decorated in yosegi and the puzzles and cabinets are at the back of the store). I spend at least an hour ogling various puzzle boxes, playing with (even solving!) some of them, watching demos of others and pawing even more of them before I make up my mind on a couple of things to buy ... only to return to the store three or four times later during the day to pick up just a couple more puzzles each time.

From Izumiya we wandered up the street to Maruyama and a couple of other shops that stock puzzles. Maruyama has a terrific collection of Karakuri boxes in a glass display cabinet that takes up most of the length of the shop - great for ogling at, while a craftsman shaves off wafer-thin slices of yosegi from blocks on his bench and passes them out to visiting puzzlers.

Hakone really is a treasure and anyone interested in puzzle boxes should visit at some point...

In between puzzle shopping, lunch was a couple of Oreo ice-creams - Gill wasn't there so I was allowed!

After lunch Stan and I wandered around town a bit and found ourselves seeking some shade down by the dock on the lake, watching swan-shaped pedalos gliding around the bay, and huge tourist boats taking folks around the lake on a sight-seeing tour, while an elderly lady in a rowing boat was trimming stray plants in the basin in front of us - it's a magical place even without the puzzles...

A couple more visits to Izumiya took care of the rest of the money I was planning to spend there and as I was leaving the store Kenzi comes out from the back of the shop with a Dream of Zebra. When he spots the look on my face he quickly hides it behind the counter and says "Sorry, not for sale!" - I don't bother hiding my disappointment and even ham it up a bit ... but it really isn't for sale.

The long bus ride back was broken for a bite to eat at a motorway services - although given its size, it's probably better described as a small shopping mall attached to a massive food court next to a motorway. I suspect that the break allows the worst of the traffic ahead to clear and we end up back at the hotel at around 8pm.

This time there are many more puzzlers in the hotel lobby - and I recognise fellow-blogger Jerry Loo from his pictures online while he's chatting to Wil so I interrupt them and introduce myself. 

After a quick shower I head back down to the lobby with puzzles in hand and join a rather rowdy crowd of puzzlers including Brian and Sue, Frank and Jo and Jerry. Dick is entertaining Jo's son Dominic with some of his disentanglement puzzles and after discovering that Dominic has solved the Cast Devil, Jerry Slocum insists on shaking the young man's hand and congratulating him...

Chinny arrived in style with a sack full of goodies including a set of Pennyhedrons I'd bought from him and a copy of Bite Me! We passed them all around and pretty soon I was the only bloke there who hadn't solved them, although in my defence, some of them held Dirk and Rob up for a while ... and at least one of them is a Chinny special - it's glued together!

Marc brought out the Reincarnation box that he'd bought in Hakone and I tried - spectacularly unsuccessfully - to get anywhere on it. A bit later when I saw how stiff it was, I didn't feel too bad - gorgeous looking puzzle though and looks very special when it's opened.

Marc also brought out his copies of Alles Roger and the Lighter and soon enough just about everyone was shaking it like a maniac and I'd managed to nudge him into solving Alles Roger.

I had a great chat with Brian about this year's limited edition puzzle while he dished out little furry koala's to most people within shouting range. For the record - I suspect that Brian will be setting another benchmark with this year's limited edition puzzle - keep an eye out for it.

Great puzzle craic!

Day 2 - puzzle-hunting in Tokyo

We learnt the importance of checking on the shuttle bus times when we narrowly missed a hotel shuttle and then had to wait almost an hour for the next one. (They're less frequent during the middle of the day and we'd agreed on a leisurely start that morning.) Faced with having to wait for the shuttle, we did the obvious thing and hauled out some puzzles and pretty soon Rob, Wil, Olga, Vladimir and Genady were all puzzling away quietly ... I managed to sort out Vladimir's Bent Nails packing puzzle in short order, but then spent ages on his rocket sliding puzzle and got virtually nowhere... (so I picked up a copy of it from him at the puzzle party on Sunday so that I can beat it at some point... hopefully!)

We took the next shuttle off to the airport and headed into Tokyo on the Narita Express (NEX to its friends) - note to self: NEX is a lot quicker and FAR more comfortable than the local train we'd taken into town the day before!

After negotiating the public transport system we arrived at our first stop for the day, the Hori Lock Company. This business has been supplying locks and hardware since 1890 and the company has built up an enviable collection of ancient locks ... Wil had been there a couple of times before and knew that at least one person there spoke English and, hopeful that we'd be allowed to view their collection, we just rocked up and asked for James (the English-speaker!). Sadly it turned out that James was 150 miles away so wouldn't be able to show us around, but undeterred Wil arranged for one of the shop assistants to show us the collection while we pored over the couple of glass cabinets of ancient locks in the shop itself.  We were shown upstairs to a wonderful treasure trove of ancient locks and artefacts that we all spent a while studying and photographing ... quite a privilege.

From there a short walk got us across to the Hakuhinkan Toy Park, a large multi-storey toy store that was known to have a reasonable supply of mass-market puzzles... and it did! We spent easily an hour or two wandering around spotting various little items and pretty much all of us came out with several new puzzles for our collections. At one stage Vladimir had discovered a couple of his own designs and was posing for pictures holding up his cheese packing puzzle.

From there we dashed off to the Taito Designers' Village for the tail end of the Tokyo Puzzle Day hosted by Torito with Nikoli and Tribox. We managed to find things still in full swing in spite of arriving half an hour before time was called, and bumped into Marc Pawliger and some of his mates... funny how you can bump into a puzzle-mate from the other side of the world in the back streets of Tokyo without any planning whatsoever!  

One of Marc's friends, showed some interest in my little yellow burr and duly managed to take it apart in pretty short order in spite of not being a particularly puzzle-y person ... I told her she hadn't finished until she'd put it back together again so she took up the challenge, and later that evening Marc delivered it back in one piece reporting that she'd been very chuffed to get it back together again!

Torito, Tribox and Nikoli all had stands and were doing a brisk trade even that late in the day, and judging by the number of young folks running around and playing with puzzles, and the general buzz around the place, I suspect the Tokyo Puzzle Day was a resounding success.

Wil and I parted company from the rest in order to get back to the hotel and managed to get onto NEX this time and then found George Bell at the airport shuttle bus stop so we caught up with him while we waited for the shuttle. Back at the hotel I did all the registration stuff and realised I'd signed up for an outing on Friday that I didn't recall booking... hey ho!

Wandering around in the lobby with my IPP name tag now prominently displayed, I found I was getting greeted like a long-lost friend by all the folks I'd met a year earlier in DC- puzzlers are a really nice bunch!

I dumped my day's shopping back in the room and had a quick shower - man it's hot and humid in Tokyo in August! When I got downstairs I found that one bunch of puzzlers had already headed up to one of the hotel restaurants and another slightly more adventurous bunch was about to head out to town in search of an interesting looking restaurant. I hung about for a bit and when Wil pitched up we headed up to the hotel's sushi restaurant for some sushi and sashimi - my first ever taste of both of them - and it was gooood!

There was lots of chat about puzzles and puzzlers over dinner before we headed back down to the lobby to join a bunch of puzzlers merrily ensconced in the free Wi-Fi area. I had a great chat with Marcel Gillen about puzzle designs and the logistics involved in making up 120 exchange puzzles - I learnt a lot from one of the masters in that chat.

At one point Rob Hegge arrived back from town (yip, it was quite late!) with some rather interesting puzzle finds, including a pair of packing puzzles in what look like soup bowls and the objects you're packing in there are either cats or dogs, if memory serves ... not sure about the idea of household pets in soup bowls, but they made for interesting puzzles.

Frans de Vreugd wandered over with his 2.5 year labour of love - a beautifully produced book filled with his gorgeous pictures of Cricket Boxes (or cricket cases if the former reminds you too much of a piece of sporting equipment). It was passed around the group and there were plenty of compliments on the book - and when he began taking orders quite a few of us put our names down for one ... and by the end of IPP he was talking about the desirability of ordering hundreds of them rather than the tens he was initially considering, so I'm guessing there were a lot more folks who were quite keen on them too ... 

...the haul after day 2... only slightly larger...

IPP 33 - Narita, Japan - the beginning

Getting there...
The drive down to Heathrow from Birmingham was pretty uneventful until I cut up a black cab who was hiding behind a large truck ... We both survived unscathed. At the check-in desk I asked whether there were any aisle seats as when I'd checked in the night before, there had only been middle seats available. After confirming that the cabin was unfortunately full ... in fact the entire plane had only 3 spare seats on it, the lady at the desk offered to sell me an upgrade to Business class for £499 ... I thanked her and declined and mentioned that I was treating myself on the way back so I'd slum it on the way out (I'd used all of Gill's air miles to upgrade to First on the way back). Hearing that, she hopped on the phone to someone somewhere and in a couple of minutes I'd been upgraded to business class for free... :-) Fantastic!

Had a lovely comfortable flight out to Narita although flying backwards took a little getting used to - especially taking off backwards... I got stopped at customs on the way into Narita and they were quite interested in my boxes of exchange puzzles, until I told them they were puzzles and that I was here for an International Puzzle Party, at which point I got waved through as just another nutter!

I found the hotel shuttle bus and climbed on board to find it totally empty ... until Wil Strijbos climbed on board too! Turned out we'd been on the same flight and I hadn't spotted him in the crowd at boarding .... and I'd stupidly assumed he'd be flying from Germany or the Netherlands!  We caught up quickly on the way to the hotel and duly rebranded it an official IPP bus given that the occupants were all IPP delegates! When we got to the hotel we found that we couldn't check in yet as it was barely 10am so we loitered in the hotel lobby with a few puzzles.

The puzzling begins...
I haul out my copy of Cover Ups for the first time along with my little yellow burr (actually called Four Mirror One, an Osanori Yamamoto design printed by Chris Purssell). While we're enjoying a little light puzzling Hendrik Haak wanders over ... the first of many puzzlers we're going to be bumping into...


We get checked in and have a quick shower before heading into town to visit Torito - Meiko's wonderful emporium of puzzles. I manage to find a bunch of puzzles that I've only ever seen on auctions just lined up on the shelves. They have a terrific stock of Hikimi puzzles, ALL of the Hanayamas, and lots of puzzles by Minoru Abe and Kohfuh Satoh. I spy one last copy of the heavy H-burr and pick that up on my first of several sweeps though the store.

Wil asks Meiko if they can call Teddy at Hanayama to see if they're able to receive a visit from some international puzzlers (which technically I guess we are!). 

While we're waiting for the call to be returned we settle down to play at the puzzling table in the centre of the store. I try and enable a pair of Cast Box puzzles (not particularly successfully) while Hendrik and Wil try and remove the ring from an entanglement puzzle they've discovered lying around. They don't have much success until Hendrik later discovers that someone else had already removed the ring and the bits they were paying with didn't come apart! (I shall pass no comment on the grounds that I will no doubt have done or will do something very similar!)

The call comes from the Hanayama offices down the road that they'd be pleased to have us over so a little while (and a few more purchases) later we head down to the offices. In spite of Meiko having given us directions on our puzzle-hunting map and Wil having been there before, we still don't quite manage to find it without checking with some of the locals...in the building the sign boards are all in Japanese so we need of ask some folks standing in the lobby if Hanayama is on the 6th floor and through the international language of nodding and pointing at the number 6 and some Japanese characters they confirm that that's what the sign says! 

Heading upstairs we find the offices and wander in behind Wil who duly greets everyone at the top of his voice and they all return the greeting like they're greeting a long lost friend! We're given cold drinks and shown into the collection / showroom where Teddy Sakamoto joins us for a lovely hour or two's chat and puzzling.

Teddy surprises the three of us with a special edition Cast Cylinder puzzle fresh from its first outing at their speed solving competition on Sunday where the winner took about 19 minutes to solve the puzzle, sight unseen according to Teddy. Unable to restrain ourselves, we take them out and start playing...

Teddy solves Wil's copy reasonably quickly - although he describes the solution as like working with a "black box" while you try and establish which pieces are where and how they behave. Hendrik duly follows suit solving his and I bring up the rear some time later although I fail to reassemble it... all the while we're playing Wil is horsing around taking photo's of Hendrik and I in various states of solving the puzzle, making sure that he has the clock in the background so it's clear just how long it's taken us - I point out a couple of times that he'd better get a calendar in shot as well in order to record my solve time!

We have a really interesting chat with Teddy about the local and export markets for Cast Puzzles and he tells us a bit about some of the upcoming designs, even pulling a brass prototype out of his pocket at one point and passing it around for us to fiddle with.

What seems like really late - in reality only around 7pm - I blame the jet-lag - we head out for a bite to eat and after one or two false starts, Teddy agrees to join us and we head off to a restaurant where Teddy orders a veritable feast for us... while the food may take a little while to start coming - when it does come, it comes in huge quantities and pretty soon the table is groaning with good looking food. Every now and then Teddy would point out what we were eating but we dispensed with that after a few rounds and just ate whatever we'd been presented with, and it was delicious. I disgraced myself several times with horrendous chopstick etiquette, earning myself a gentle lesson from Strijbos on not being rude to our wonderful host.

After dinner we bid Teddy farewell at Akihabara station where we head off back to our hotel - but fail to solve the final puzzle of the day: "return to hotel via express" - we knew what we wanted to do but a combination of misunderstanding some signs at Tokyo station, getting on the wrong train, trains not actually stopping at the airport for some reason we found ourselves in need of some late night travel advice, which was duly provided by a helpful young chap who turned out to be an English teacher. His advice and some further guidance from a friendly conductor who understood no English saw us getting to the station in Narita town where we got a cab back to the hotel... thus completing a day's travel by planes, buses, trains and taxis.

Back at the hotel I took the opportunity to catch up on some emails before crashing for the night ... or at least until 4am at which point I was WIDE AWAKE, so I got up and wrote up my notes of the first day's adventures...


The first day's haul...

Stickman #3 Mechanical Puzzlebox – aka 106-move Box

Stickman #3 is the last in my latest bunch of new acquisitions. I'd come across one in Wil Strijbos' collection a couple of years back and Louis and I had fiddled around with it a bit - I got nowhere... so when it arrived I was pretty keen to have a bash at it. 

I started exercising the various gears and levers and sliders and gizmos while feeling for any give on the part that I was expecting to be a drawer of some description - hoping it would give some sort of clue when it was near to moving ... but it gave absolutely no feedback ... so I played some ... quite a bit more ... until, certain that I was doing what I should be doing and getting no feedback, I took out the solution booklet and worked my way through the first part of the solution ... and where it said slide the drawer - NADA! 

At this stage I was pretty confident that things should be moving, and weren't, so I got out the screwdrivers and removed all the gears and gizmo's from the top of the box (this is probably the only Stickman design you can remove almost all of the locking mechanism using a screwdriver! - Lucky me!), made sure there was nothing left that could be stopping the drawer from moving and then squeezed the drawer until it eventual let go and came sliding out ... with a movement that felt almost like a bond of some form of finishing product that had stuck to itself...

Having dislodge the drawer took off some of the sticky bits with some high grit paper, testing the fit every now and then until I was more or less happy that it should slide pretty freely now. Then I got out the Renaissance Wax and gave the drawer a light coating to lubricate things a bit before reassembling the all the gears and gizmo's once more ... making sure that everything was in a known possible position so that I wouldn't have the take it all apart again. Once the screws were all tightened I had another go at trying to open it ... and this time things went like clockwork! 

Right, so you have a main driver dial over in the top left hand corner that will turn almost 360 degrees ... and at the extremes it moves a slider up and down. While the main driver dial is turning, it drives a gear train that in turn drives one of a pair of floating gears which in turn drive the right-most gear, sending a pair of sliders in opposite directions ... and those sliders can each get blocks by another pair of linked sliders running perpendicular to them. (Just look at the picture!) Oh, and that floating pair of gears - there's a way to immobilise them... sometimes that's useful!

Work out how that all works together, or doesn't and you can use that to find a series of moves to open three interior compartments ... and depending on how you approach this, you might find it rather difficult to realise where the final compartment is, and what you need to do to get into it ... and for the record, this box's nickname of 106-move box assumes that you got it all right all the way through... so I'd expect most puzzlers using considerably more moves to find all three compartments.

...and closing it up is not just the reverse of opening it - that'd just be way too simple! 

It's a clever design that layers a couple of puzzle mechanisms on top of one another in a wooden mechanical kinetic sculpture. 

Excellent!

It may have taken a little TLC to get the 8-year-old working smoothly again after being carefully protected from both the elements (and potentially dangerous puzzlers) by its previous owner, but it's working beautifully now and I intend to call upon my puzzling mates to help me keep it well exercised in the future - just like all Stickmen should.

Stickman Fulcrum Puzzlebox

Looking at the usual pictures of this box on the web gives the impression of something a lot larger than it is in real life – I’d always pictured something akin to my mom’s old sewing box, so the first time I saw one at James Dalgety’s marvellous emporium I was really surprised to see how small it was – it’s dinky!

Back in 2006 these puzzles were originally sold for just over $100 when they were described as fairly trivial puzzles by their maker, albeit puzzles that begged to be picked up and played with. Nowadays they regularly change hands for many times their original price on the specialist puzzle auction sites – but finding one that’s available remains a huge challenge. 

 

You’re told that there are two compartments to be discovered and you’ll discover a few panels that might slide if they weren’t connected through a series of interlinked arms that are in turn tied to sliding locks on the sides… and depending on how you start moving the panels, you either  get a tiny bit of movement or immediately block every other potential move ... or that's what it can feel like!

A bit of experimentation and you can find a pathway through the various sliding panels that will enable you to move forward until the first compartment slides open... and couple more moves and the second opens up, with the inside of the top panel revealing Rob's customary Stickman signature... good enough to sign cheques with!

Easily the dinkiest Stickman in my collection - and definitely one of the cutest.