Here’s another beautiful bit of wooden puzzle design and craftsmanship from Denver metagrobologist Kagen Schaefer. The locking mechanism was recently reverse-engineered by Instructables user dombeef, who has made a working paper version.
Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, this elegant version of the classic sliding-tile puzzle executed in Lego elements by Peer Kreuger. The assembled puzzle has no visible studs.
I built one of these years ago from plans I saw in Slocum and Botterman’s New Book of Puzzles, and still delight in playing with it, so I was pleased as–geez, I can’t say “pleased as punch” and still respect myself in the morning, so I’ll just leave it at “really pleased”–to see this new tutorial from Instructables user Phil B about how it’s done. From the outside, the puzzle is deceptively simple: You can guess from Phil’s description that you’ve got to spin it, to win it, but there’s a devious twist. The book I saw it in had a picture of a clear plastic version that showed off how the mechanism worked, but that makes it rather too easy to figure out; the best way to appreciate Yoshigahara’s design is to build one for yourself, then give it to somebody else to puzzle over.
Apart from the fact that the bricks and plates are open at their bottoms, and so the pieces always have one side that can’t be “smooth,” Lego is a pretty handy way to prototype interlocking solid puzzles. Many of these are based on cubic units, and can be built in Lego at a scale of 1 cube = 2 studs x 2 studs x 5 plates.
Eric Harshbarger, whose Lego hijinks we’ve featured a couple times before, has produced some lovely models based on this principle. Shown above are his 6-piece burr, checkered solid pentominoes, Soma cube, and deluxe polycube set. The awesomeness continues at Eric’s site.
I like this concept design from German product designer Konstantin Slawinski that integrates the pieces of the classic three-piece “wooden knot” puzzle into a knife, a fork, and a spoon to make an interlocking set of cutlery. I don’t think there’s a deliberate nod to Bill Cutler (WOTD: “metagrobologist”) going on here, but I kinda wish there were. He calls it “Join.” [via Core77]
This lovely object is more than just an interesting gewgaw: It’s called a “turner’s cube”–so named, I think, because it is a challenge for one who turns on a lathe rather than eponymously–and according to Bob Warfield, “[i]n the old days, novice machinist’s [sic] were handed one and told to work out how to make one of their own.” Bob’s got a cool page describing his efforts to make one manually and then using a CNC mill, with some bonus commentary on this thread by CNC Zone member widgitmaster, who made the cube pictured above, using the jig pictured above, on a big engine lathe. Beautiful!
Bumped into one of my new neighbors at the mailbox last week, and when I mentioned that I work for MAKE, she mentioned that her teenage son builds puzzles. Mechanical puzzles. Complicated ones. Turns out, he doesn’t just build them–he designs original configurations and sells them online. He’s got a following.
