A while back, I had designed a 3D Skull using Burr Tools. I planned to use this design but there was only one (major) problem; I could only fabricate the steel pieces by laser cutting. Which meant that I could only cut on flat sheets of steel, not in 3D shapes like those done by CNC machining. Given this limitation, I had to re-design my Skull entirely.

After a week or so of designing on and off, my ninth revision resulted in my “final” design. With the help of my friend and fellow puzzler Rex Perez who created the design in DWG format, I was ready to have Skull fabricated. The plan was to use 5mm thick 304 stainless steel like the Dirty Dozen. Completed and assembled, the puzzle would measure about 55mm x 35mm x 30mm. I took the opportunity to try out two other metal cutting vendors instead of the one who did the cutting for my Dirty Dozen. Files were emailed and payments made. A week later I received 25 loose pieces from each of the vendors.

The 3-unit locking piece that goes right through and into the top of the skull

Skull with shaky bones

The first prototype from Vendor A was a dismal “failure”. The tolerance was so tight that the pieces could not fit at all. I could use a small file to sand down the pieces, but too much work. Wasted effort and money. The second Vendor B’s work is what you see here. All 25 pieces fit nicely, but with a bit too much free play between the pieces. A lot of shaking and rattling! Rex commented that the power output of the laser may have been too high. Thus “burning” away too much metal, making the notches and grooves bigger than intended. But at least when assembled, a semblance of a skull comes into play. You can recognize that the puzzle is a skull afterall. Another saving grace is that with the little 3-unit locking piece in place, none of the pieces will fall apart even when shaken hard.

As of this post, I have just finished design revision #14. A much improved design with re-shaping almost every piece. In fact its now been reduced to 24 pieces only. See the screen shot of the Burr Tools file shown here. In theory at least, the whole puzzle is better reinforced and supported and should not shake and rattle so much if the tolerances are improved. I will go for a second prototype. Have to explain to the fabricator how the pieces are supposed to work (they have no idea what the pieces are for!). Hope this one will turn out better.

The post 3D Puzzle – Berro(Skull) appeared first on JL Puzzles.

I think a wooden puzzle coming from Wil Strijbos would be usually somewhat of a surprise. Most puzzlers know Wil Strijbos as a designer of challenging, high quality (and some rather expensive) puzzles made of metal!  Well, don’t let the title of this post fool you. This wooden puzzle from Wil was actually his Exchange Puzzle during IPP37 in Paris last August. And this wooden puzzle was designed by someone else. This is not to say that Wil has never designed wooden ones. He has many years ago, and one of them called Just Fit (The Cut) also happen to win  the 1990 Hikimi Puzzle Competition for wooden puzzle designs.

Back to the puzzle. This interlocking burr goes by the  name of Framed Sticks 4U and is designed by a Mr Gong. Now I have never met Mr Gong, but I understand he is a close friend of Wil and resides in China. Mr Gong has designed a number of wooden burr puzzles (made out of bamboo) which have been sold by Wil in the past several years through Wil’s distribution email list.

design & construction

The FS4U is a 6 x 6 x 5 solid. It is an interlocking framed burr consisting of a square frame and 4 typical burr pieces (sticks) with the usual type of notches. Nothing overly unusual. The frame (box) spots a couple of obstructions glued to the insides which restrict the movements of the pieces and thus brings the level of difficulty of the puzzle to a Level 24 solution. This means that it takes 24 moves to remove the first piece. And a total of 30 moves to disassemble the entire puzzle.  I checked Mr Gong’s design against other 6 x 6 x 5 size puzzles on PWPB and I didn’t find any which were similar in design or number of pieces. Only one other design had a similar shape. So Mr Gong’s design appears to be very different from the rest.

The FS4U is made of two different woods but as to the exact species I don’t know. The burr sticks consist of two pairs with dark and light colours to give the puzzle some colour contrast. Construction and fit is good. Although the copy here is not the kind of very impeccable standard that one would get from the usual few North American or European puzzle craftsmen.  Everything worked properly and the sticks slid smoothly. No issues. The puzzle is produced under Wil’s Streetwise Inc brand, the same company that manufactures all of Wil’s metal puzzles. Size wise, it is about 7.5cm x 7.5cm x 6cm and surprisingly quite heavy in the hand, so the woods used  must probably be some exotic wood.

The puzzle has a shiny finishing to the external surface, as if coated with some form of vanish covering, which seems rather unusual since.  Most wooden puzzles would have some form of (tung) oil rubbed into the wood to smoothen,  nourish and preserve the wood But this is my first wooden puzzle I have with such a smooth and shiny surface.

SOLVING & PLAY

At Level 24.2.2.2, the FS4U is not easy. The disassembly took me a while to get the hang off, given there are some dead ends during the solve at the beginning. But because you can see the movement of the sticks from both the top and bottom openings of the frame, it is not as difficult as other similarly high level burrs. At some point I was able to figure out the moves to remove the first piece. Once that came out, the rest just popped out of the frame. Re-assembly was a different thing altogether! Despite my best efforts to remember the moves (and even photographing the process, because I know burrs like these are quite beyond me), I still had to resort to the provided solution sheet. Thankfully I was also further aided by Burr Tools, which helped me get all the pieces back to their proper places.

The post A Wooden Puzzle From Wil Strijbos appeared first on JL Puzzles.

During IPP37, we exchanged puzzles and his puzzle to me was Deadly Romance, a pretty cool and intriguing name I might add. Deadly Romance was Markus’ own design and the production duties went to Pelikan Puzzles of the Czech Republic.  Quality of construction and finish is very good up to the usual Pelikan standards. The puzzle is an interlocking cage burr…but with a twist. The goal is to “put the two pieces into the cage with the colours of the pieces and the cage matching…”. Both the cage and the pieces are made of a combo of maple and wenge to provide the dark and light colours. The puzzle comes assembled and you need to remove the pieces from the cage and replace the same pieces according to the instructions. To remove was not too difficult since there are only two pieces. However, to fit them back into the cage AND match the colours at the same time…a much more daunting task, which I failed miserably. It was only with the help of Burr Tools that I discovered the way the pieces were supposed to go in and the type of moves required. And it (with hindsight) wasn’t so that difficult it would appear, if only I had kept at it and not give up. Well, whoever said I was with good with burrs anyway? which I am not.

Markus Gotz has a number of puzzle designs to his name and I have a couple of his exchange puzzles that I have yet to play with. He is also responsible for the very unique looking packing puzzle Framework II.

The post Deadly Romance appeared first on JL Puzzles.

The TIF was the exchange puzzle of Bernhard Schweitzer of Germany at IPP37 in Paris this past August. Bernhard makes his own puzzles and runs a puzzle site called www.puzzlewood.de.  While his site is in German, you can easily do a Google translate to read it in English. Anyway the nice pictures of the many puzzles in the site gallery speak for themselves.

TIF basically comprises a cube-shaped cage that locks two odd-shaped pieces inside. Each of the two pieces consists of 8 units. Apart from this Type B here, there are also Types A and C. For A and C, there are also just two pieces each 8 units, and identical cages but the pieces for each puzzle are differently shaped. Not sure what made Bernhard choose Type B over the other two since all three solutions of A, B and C are the same level of difficulty. Although the TIF has only two removable pieces, nonetheless it still has a level 8.2 solution, meaning that it takes minimum 8 moves to remove the first piece and 2 moves to remove the second. Nothing to be scoffed at here!

The exchange copy came in Smoked Cherry for the cage and Maple for the pieces. Construction fit and finish is decent and the pieces slide smoothly but snugly. My copy became stuck after I got back to Singapore from IPP due to the high humidity but within a day or two in the dryer, everything worked as intended. Maple expands rather quickly when there is high humidity and the day after I solved the puzzle, the pieces felt unusually tight again. Dimensionally the TIF measures about 70mm all round.

TIF is one of those burr puzzles that I generally enjoy and can manage without any aid; mainly because they are lower level burrs that are more suited for a non-burrist like myself. This is one of those puzzles that I could take the pieces apart AND scramble them and not forget how to put them back together. No Burr Tools needed-ha! Of course the fact that the TIF has only two pieces helps a lot in the remembering of the orientation of the pieces during assembly. For an experienced puzzler and even a non-burr enthusiast, not at all that difficult, although the re-assembly may be a tad more challenging, which is usually the case in burr puzzles.

The post Two In Frame Type B appeared first on JL Puzzles.

I decided to up the ante and see if I could come up with an 8 piece version with a (higher) unique solution. After several days of toying with Burr Tools, I managed to design a version, L(eight)tice-2 having a level 5.1.2 single solution. I contacted Andrei and told him about my design and asked if he would consider making copies of L(eight)tice-2 in aluminium.  There were several exchanges of Facebook messages and Andrei agreed to cut a prototype out of 5mm aluminium sheet.  This was several weeks before IPP37 in Paris in August.  Andrei said he would try to have the prototype ready and show it to me at IPP.

On the Awards Night Banquet of IPP37,  Andrei walked over to my table and plonked this heavy hefty aluminium L(eight)tice-2 down. It was pretty massive at 70mm x 70mm x 40mm! I played with it for a while but very gently. I did not want to unravel the pieces as I knew I wouldn’t be able to put everything back together at the dinner table without help. It felt fairly stable and none of the pieces dropped out even after being shaken pretty hard. This prototype was returned to Andrei and he said he would try experiment with 3mm thick stainless steal to produce a smaller sized puzzle. Andrei later reported that another attendee at IPP37 solved the puzzle by hand without too much difficulty. Well, kudos to him for being such a good solver.

After I returned home from IPP, I tried to improve on my design; unfortunately there is only so much one can do with board burr pieces confined to dimensions of 70mm x 40mm. But after quite a fair amount of tweaking,  I did manage to increase the level of difficulty from Level 5.1.2 to a Level 6.1.1.2. However the downside was that I could not get it down to a unique solution. So this latest version would have 2 solutions, one Level 5, the other Level 6. The Level 6 solution with 13 steps (on paper at least) seems to indicated that the whole ensemble would be harder to solve and also appearing even more stable than the earlier version.

I subsequently dropped Andrei a note about this second iteration of my design and when the time came to produce copies in stainless steal, he adopted my “improved” design ie L(8)tice-2. While waiting for his metal puzzle, I decided to cut a copy out of acrylic. The plastic version confirmed my theory above; fitting pretty snugly together and harder to solve. A couple of weeks later, Andrei finished producing his copies and listed them for sale on his site. He had experimented with various tolerances and the copy I received from him was firm and “tight”. The puzzle feels very solid and heavy in the hand and no way would the pieces be shaken loose unless it was violently thrown to the floor.  My copy of L(8)tice-2 had nicely rounded corners and polished to a smooth matt surface, very nice to the touch. Very good construction and high quality indeed.  At either level, the L(8)tice-2 is not an easy puzzle and I still cannot solve it without the aid of Burr Tools. And I must add that it is quite a challenge to handle all 8 pieces at the same time during assembly! Metal interlocking burr puzzles are rare and hard to come by. I am really delighted  that Andrei Ivanov has made available the L(8)tice-2 (US$48) and other of his metal puzzles for sale.

The post L(8)tice-2 Interlocking Burr appeared first on JL Puzzles.

My CrossFit puzzle was inspired by two puzzles. First, it was Goh Pit Khiam’s Number Blocks which appeared at IPP35 in Ottawa, Canada. That puzzle had four pieces which danced in and out of a tray with an overhang which made it into an interlocking packing puzzle, which requires a certain number of moves in proper sequence to solve. Not quite your usual 2D style packing puzzle. The second puzzle is Tom Jolly’s Square Dance which has 9 pieces and has a level 1.8.5.3.4 solution.

I was looking to design something that was somewhere in between the two and for the sake of achieving a symmetrical shape, settled in the end for a “cross” shape. And you need to fit 5 odd-shaped pieces into the tray… hence the name CrossFit (which is also the name of a type of high intensity gym workout). Designing wasn’t the problem and my basic design was very kindly scaled up by fellow puzzler Stanislav Knot of the Czech Republic.

I asked Tom Lensch (who had produced copies of my IPP36 Design Competition entry “Magiq #8”) to cut a prototype for me. I was hoping to enter the CrossFit for the IPP37 Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition. Tom kindly agreed to do so, but said he couldn’t do so in time for the competition. And while he was very busy with making puzzles for IPP37, he still managed to produce a single prototype copy and passed it to me at IPP37 in Paris. As you can see from the photos, Tom did a great job making the puzzle, even for a prototype.

The goal of CrossFit was to re-arrange a scrambled set of digits into the correct order. To assemble the pieces to the solved state requires 21 moves with a level 1.2.10.5.3 solution. On paper it seems to be a nice challenge of slightly above moderate difficulty. And Tom himself found it pretty difficult to solve too. However, when Tom passed it to Gary Foshee (designer of Lunatic Lock and Open Transparent Lock), Gary shifted the pieces here and there and solved it under 10 minutes. So maybe it wasn’t as challenging as I had hoped. Well, I will see if I can improve the design to a level where I think its good enough for the design competition. Meanwhile CrossFit will remain a nice well-crafted prototype.

Micro Hex

Again here I was inspired by someone else’s design…that of Wil Strijbos! No need to mention the many (metal) puzzles he is well-known for. Just google Wil Strijbos and you can his puzzles and (even get his contact details, I am told). The puzzle of inspiration was his Heavy Metal Triangle Puzzle. Wil’s was a 3-piece puzzle which forms a triangular shape. I was hoping to produce a 6-piece puzzle to form hexagon shape. After much effort with Burr Tools, I managed to come up with a unique solution design for what I thought could work quite well. All 6 pieces were identical and nicey formed the hex version of Wil Strijbos’ Triangle Puzzle. And it required a minimum of 8 moves to remove the 1st piece.

I sent my design to Steve Nicholls who does a lot of 3D printing work including puzzles of course. He has been a great help in 3D printing several other puzzle prototypes for me in the past and his work is very good. He 3D prints all his puzzles for exchange at IPP. In the meantime, I also scouted around for a CNC fabricator that could CNC mill my Micro Hex. There were a several vendors who could do the job but all were prohibitively expensive when it came to just making a single copy. I also contacted and told Wil of my design and asked if he would like to get his fabricator (who had manufactured the Triangle Puzzle) to make my Micro Hex. To my surprise, Wil told me that a long time ago, he had already produced a Hex-shaped metal version with 6 pieces!..but just not as many moves to solve as mine…oh well!

Like Tom, Steve was also busty preparing for IPP but did manage to pass me a yellowish 3D printed copy of Micro Hex in Paris as well as another Hexagon shaped design I called Hexagonal Shift. Steve did comment that Micro Hex did have piece(s) that could rotate during play. Now this is dreaded because rotation means a solver can short cut a move to solve the puzzle in an unintended way by twisting or rotating a piece out of the puzzle easily. I tested out the puzzle myself and found that indeed I could rotate some pieces but only with a bit of force. On hindsight, it was a blessing in disguise that I didn’t proceed with any expensive CNC machining given the rotation problem. As of this writing, Steve will try to make adjustments to the height of the puzzle in the hopes of eliminating any rotational moves. Let see what he comes up with.

The post CrossFit & Micro Hex Prototypes appeared first on JL Puzzles.

But this year at IPP37 in Paris last August, I received a pleasant surprise. His exchange puzzle HOPE was not a sliding block puzzle but an interlocking caged burr!

At first glance, the HOPE appears to consist of a cage and 4 separate burr pieces. But actually the entire puzzle is only made up of 3. Typically 3D printed puzzles do not have that sort of sharp and precise lines and edges found on well-crafted wooden puzzles. But the copy I have I must say, the quality is really very decent and well made (printed). The slightly shinny shade of blue chosen by Diniar for the pieces really stands out; a nice contrast against the white cage holding them. And if there’s one thing I really like about this puzzle is the colour and aesthetics. The puzzle measures 7cm x 5cm x 5cm. Pretty sturdy and tough too.

The object of course is to remove the pieces and then put them back in the cage. This is where the 2 pieces bring the level of difficulty down a couple of notches. The “H” and “P” pieces are fused together as in the “O” and “E”. While there are only 2 pieces, this burr is still (as far as my counting tells me) a level 15 or 16.1 solution puzzle. This means it takes 15 (or 16) moves to extract the first of the 2 pieces out of the cage. Not a walk in the park for novices.

I am usually hopeless at this sort of interlocking puzzles but I did manage this one pretty well and didn’t have to resort to Burr Tools! A bit of practice here and here I was able to repeat solve the HOPE a couple of times even. Not too difficult once you commit the moves to memory and frankly, for this puzzle it is not that hard to do so.

The post HOPE appeared first on JL Puzzles.

There are 3 congruent pieces of one design and a pair of another, while the last piece is “pin-less”. Object is to take apart and put the puzzle back to together. Very well made by Bart Buie (check out his site here which features a tasty selection of Stewart Coffin puzzles ranging from $45 to a whopping $405 for an STC-7 called Jupiter with 30 different woods!). While the pieces fitted too tightly at first due to the high Singapore humidity, this problem was solved after several hours in my puzzle dry box. The puzzle is about the size of a regular Rubik’s Cube.

Taking apart is pretty straight forward; once you have the first piece out, the rest is easily removable. But putting the thing back together is a tad more tricky, particularly if you scramble the pieces. But because there are two sets of identical pieces and the outer surface of the puzzle is not supposed to show any pinholes, the assembly is not overly complicated. Certainly manageable with some patience, although if you got the orientation of the pieces wrong, you may hit a dead end; some pins just don’t fit into certain holes. Sorry Burr Tools won’t be of any use here. Again, I have to say its at a level of difficulty appropriate for an Exchange Puzzle. Even novices can have fun with the Long & Short and not feel frustrated.

The Long & Short, according to fellow puzzle blogger Kevin Sadler, is the easiest challenge of a much bigger (a bit of an understatement here) puzzle called the Grand Pinhole which has a mind-boggling 43 pieces (if I counted correctly).

The post Long & Short appeared first on JL Puzzles.

The Non-Void Cube is from Andreas Rover- yes, the ONE who created and free-shared with the world Burr Tools; the indispensable and holy grail of puzzle design tools (no pun intended) for designers everywhere. Without Burr Tools, I am pretty certain that 99.5% of the designs on www.puzzlewillbeplayed.com would not be in existence today, we would not have the huge number wooden and other interlocking puzzles we have now and Eric Fuller would probably still be a professional soldier in the US Army.

At first glance, the Non-Void Cube, with its plastic appearance, looks very much like an ordinary Rubik’s Cube without any of the coloured stickers. In fact its a 3D printed interlocking burr designed and created by Andreas. The Cube is very nicely printed and the tolerances between the pieces sufficiently tight. Notwithstanding, the pieces move and slide smoothly and I experienced no jamming whatsoever. Size-wise, the Cube is 6cm all round, the size of a normal Rubik’s Cube.

And what is unique about the Non-Void Cube is that it has got no voids (holes) within the cube, yet it has a Level 4.3.3 solution, something that is impossible to achieve with a typical burr design. Andreas managed to create this puzzle by attaching the cubes of the 4 pieces not by joining the faces of the cubes, but via their corners (see photo above). In this manner the pieces can slide in the various directions even without the voids or voxels necessary.

While it takes only 4 moves to remove the first piece (and with some effort not too difficult to figure out) and 3 moves each to remove the next two, the design is not without some trickiness. If you scramble all the pieces after disassembly, and unless you have a very good memory, you may just forget the orientation of the pieces (like I did) and find yourself in a bit of a bind trying to reassemble the thing. Again with some persistence and time, it is do-able. And Burr Tools would not help you here if you can’t solve it, Haha!. Is Andreas hiding some features of the software which he is only keeping to himself?

The post Non-Void Cube “Burr” Puzzle appeared first on JL Puzzles.