Don't Shout Box

Family Portrait

A while back (yikes!...in 2011…) I really enjoyed playing with Phil Tomlinson’s Always Empty Box which I’d acquired via Puzzle Paradise. Previously I’d seen pics of Phil’s rather awesome puzzle cabinets – where the entire display cabinet is one big puzzle box with some pretty well-hidden tricks and locks that need to be defeated in order to get into your puzzle stash.

The Always Empty Box was delightful and a real departure from anything I’d seen before in a puzzle box. The mechanism was pretty unusual and a couple of the moves really took me by surprise.

…so when Phil posted a pic on FaceBook of a new design he was calling the Don’t Shout Box, I paid careful attention. A few copies were listed for auction on Puzzle Paradise a few days later and I piled in to make sure that I managed to snag one of the first few copies available. There was plenty of interest in them and I was well-chuffed a couple of nights ago when I came home to find my Don’t Shout Box waiting for me to play with.

There’s a very clear family resemblance to the Always Empty Box - they look almost identical, they're made from the same woods (mainly curly maple and black walnut) and they’re both decorated with a pair of red inlaid curves on the top. the only difference is that Don't Shout has an additional inlaid maple stripe between the red curves. They look great next to one another.

On my initial casual fiddling I spotted a few rather curious extra lines on the sides that I hadn’t expected – although, in fairness, there were some pretty similar lines on the Always Empty Box - memory is not my strongest point. My next couple of discoveries were a bit more along the lines of what you might expect from this sort of a puzzle box, although they weren’t really where I was expecting them… 

…and the next couple of moves are pretty darned unusual – I definitely didn’t see those coming! 

And even the final act of opening the box has a lovely little twist to it that might just hold up the unwary a little longer than necessary.

Having opened the box, you should understand where the box gets its name from – it’s a lovely little tip of the hat and a cute little hint that was there all along, only you wouldn’t have recognised it as such until it was too late to be useful. Clever. 

Phil has followed up a terrific first puzzle box with another great design. I think his latest creation throws in some neat new ideas and a couple of twists on some older ones. I really hope that Phil can be convinced to keep channelling his clearly excellent skills at crafting wood into new little puzzle boxes for us addicts, err, collectors – because he clearly has some fantastic ideas judging from the first two boxes he’s given us.

If it’s not thoroughly obvious, I reckon the Don’t Shout Box is a great puzzle box. Phil still has some available for sale, so if you’re interested in bagging one, get in touch with him via FaceBook, or if you’re allergic to that, drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch with him.

Seasons Greetings

A very belated thank you to Simon and Louis for my puzzling seasonal greeting cards. 

Simon sent me a great riddle card that made you work for your greeting - with a few clues inside along with a handwritten note claiming it would be too easy for me ... well, Simon, for the record, it wasn't ... I needed all the clues and then one or two more that I picked up from a friendly puzzlers on-line forum before I managed to solve it ... thanks for tickling the little grey cells (more than) a bit. 


...and then Louis, my partner in puzzle-design-crime, conjured up another fantastic impossible folded card to adorn his (now traditional?) Christmas card.

By the way, if it doesn't look all that impossible, ask yourself how the red star got to be quite like that since the only cuts on the card are the ones that you can see and nothing has been rejoined using tape or glue, and that red star is still very much attached to the rest of the card.

Thanks guys! :-)

Pair Dance

[Forgive me blogfather for I have not blogged for 10 days ...  

I'll be in the corner doing my Hail Coffins.]

Eric’s latest releases at Cubic Dissection included a real little gem from Osanori Yamamoto called Pair Dance. They were available in a choice of woods and mine has a jatoba frame and a pair of purpleheart burr pieces. 

It arrives assembled and the first thing you’ll notice is that the tolerances are incredible! When I started playing with it those pieces were very snug and needed to be kept cleanly aligned to enable them to move. While I was idly fiddling around I noticed that in a few of the configurations, you could rotate one or both of the pieces inside the frame, and thinking I was onto something useful, I spent a while exploring what turned out to be an unnecessary diversion. 

There is a relatively clear series of moves required to get to a place where you can start making good progress toward getting the pieces out of the frame. From there it’s a reasonably straight-forward process of doing what you can, making some adjustments and then doing what you can again until the first piece is freed. 

 

Putting them back in is a bit more of a challenge, although having a symmetrical frame does help reduce the combinations. Even though it’s a level 14 puzzle, it’s reasonably accessible, even for non-burrphiles like myself!

It’s a fun puzzle to fiddle with and I often find myself grabbing it from beside the PC and playing around absent-mindedly with it while I’m engrossed in something useful, or watching videos of cute puppies on YouTube. 

[Oh, and rotations aren't required!] 

Illusion

Somehow I managed to miss Mike Toulouzas’ Illusion when it was first offered. My mate Chris had picked up a copy and brought it around to one of our show-and-tells - it was clearly a gorgeous puzzle … and he couldn’t say enough good things about it puzzle-wise … so when Mike got in touch at the tail end of last year and offered me a copy, I didn’t give him any time to change his mind or offer it to anyone else.

It duly arrived in Barnt Green during a period of enforced puzzle-hostage-taking as Gill’s got wise to my puzzle-buying around Christmas and now routinely hijacks any parcels addressed to me during December and puts them under the Christmas tree … so shortly after Christmas I got to unwrap this beauty from Greece. 

Saying that Mike has a knack for creating beautiful objects that just happen to be incredible puzzles is a bit like saying English weather is generally lousy! Case in point: today we had about 45 minutes of bright sunshine (we hid indoors, not knowing what it was!), some snow, a serious helping of hail and a shed-load of rain – while the temperature hovered around 4 degrees Celsius. I digress…

Illusion looks a bit like a complicated 12-piece burr with some extra detailing around the centre that makes it look like the burr is projecting out of a cube in the middle. Look a little closer and you’ll spot a few diagonal cuts on the burr pieces and that’s enough to help you realise that this little puzzle is not at all what it first appears to be … and knowing that Mike is a master at odd angles, you’ll realise that this puzzle quickly earns, and definitely requires, huge amounts of respect. 

A bit of a casual fiddle around with this puzzle and you find it’s not going to come apart the way you might have expected … find the right axis and it’ll slide apart neatly, and then, unless you’re handling it rather carefully, it will dismantle itself into six rather oddly shaped pieces … each of which is unique!

It’s pretty easy to get the general idea of how the puzzle is going to go back together again – each of the six pieces has four of the sticks and some elements of the central cube structure, and combing them builds up the cube in the middle … sort of … because there are a bunch of protuberances on each piece which need to have corresponding gaps in their adjacent pieces … which on their own would make for a pretty reasonable challenge … HOWEVER you’ll then find there are multiple assemblies – virtually all of which cannot be solved!

I’ve spent ages with five pieces locked together perfectly, with spaces in exactly the right place for the final piece to be slotted in, but no way of actually getting that last piece into the assembly because the sliding axis that I need to have has somehow been blocked somewhere by a well-fitting, albeit misplaced, piece. 

Then onto another five-piece assembly that stubbornly refuses to admit the final piece even though it’s the perfect shape … until eventually a five-piece assembly arrives with a sliding axis to remove two pieces, add the final piece and slide the two halves together … puzzle-bliss. 

Mike’s taken a well-known puzzle, added several unique Toulouzas touches to it and turned it into an absolute beast! A drop-dead gorgeous beast, but a beast nonetheless! The craftsmanship in there is staggering – each of the six pieces is made up of around 10 individual oddly-shaped bits – glued together supremely accurately with the result that the illusion of twelve sticks piercing a cube is almost perfect. 

Bravo Mike! That is an awesome achievement and a terrific puzzle! Thanks.

Stickman Holiday Lockbox

OK – if you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time you will have noticed that I’m an unabashed Stickman fan-boy … heck, even Gill’s a huge fan of Rob’s work, and that’s saying something!

So when Nick Baxter’s auction machine swung into action again recently, and it had a few Stickman boxes on it, I paid attention. While I didn’t manage to get most of the things I was trying to acquire, I was successful on one of them, and a rather well-looked-after Stickman Holiday Lockbox arrived in Barnt Green a couple of weeks later. 

First released back in 2005, the Holiday Lockbox was available in either oak or maple. I’m not sure how many maple boxes were produced, but I’ve only ever seen the oak version. With a distinctive red colour, it’s pretty easy to recognise with three big dials on the top of the box and a latch / slider across the front of it. The two ends are decorated with some neat inlay work that definitely add a nice feature, unless you got one of the second batch of these – they didn’t have the inlay work on the ends. [Useless little puzzle-geek-factoid for you.] 

The three dials on the top of the box are used to represent a date and can be set to any date the owner prefers. Opening the box is a simple matter of using a paper template that fits over the dials to set a month (first, smaller dial on the left – it’s American, remember), day and year, and once you’ve set that properly, the slider will move and the lid can be opened. 

Now although it wasn’t meant to be a puzzlebox, you can use the little grey cells, a deft touch and some experimentation to pick the lock and open it without the combination, so I can deem it a puzzle anyway! (As if I needed any excuses to buy another Stickman box!)

I suspect that a lot more of these turned out to be puzzles than Rob may have intended as the booklets with the date templates were shipped inside the boxes and anyone fiddling with the dials before trying the slider would have had their helpful paper template sealed inside the box until they managed to puzzle their way in! I’m sure he didn’t do that intentionally … <GRIN> 

Rob’s rather clever design for the mechanism uses three discs to drive a set of sliders left and right – when they’re in the proper position, they allow the locking slider to move out of the way to enable the lid to be opened. The designs allows two interesting things – firstly, the dials on the top can effectively spin freely, never coming up against a stop and secondly, the left/right sliders can be loosened allowing the owner to set a unique date as the unlock code … cool. 

The implementation also has another little feature that I discovered when I first opened the box – I was using my somewhat non-existent lock picking skills and had successfully opened the box, however when I put the template over the dials, I found that one or two of the dials were in exactly the opposite position to where they should have been – which given the geometry of the mechanism makes sense: there will be two places on the dial where the left/right sliders are in the desired spot… [Another useless little puzzle-geek-factoid for you.]

One more Stickman added to the collection… many more to go! :-)