SPIR ALA Rips

Not sure what the name means but Vesa Timonen seems to have done it again. Again just two pieces  but this time with one hole in each piece. The goal is to place the pieces flat on a table such that the resulting shape can be bisected into two identical shapes. I absolutely had no luck with this one but did however enjoy the nice strong woody scent emanating from the Curly Birch used to produce this puzzle.

French Revolution

French colours adorned here of course. Consisting of four pieces, one blue and three red, the goal is to form three possible symmetrical shapes using a combination of the blue piece and any two of the three red pieces. As of this post, I only managed to  find one of the  three possible solutions. Like the name suggest, I kept going round in circles to no avail. The other two shapes have eluded me thus far.

3 Pieces 9 symmetric shapes

A straight forward self-explanatory name for the puzzle but this one is anything by straight forward. And the puzzle consist of only three pieces. The goal is to form 9 symmetric shapes but after two days of play, I managed only to form 3 shapes…a rather dismal result percentage if I may add.

SYM-353

Now this one is from me, yes! SYM-353 was my exchange puzzle at IPP37. Why the “353”? Well, it consist of three pieces; two with 3 sides and one with 5 sides. Sym 353 was a  design collaboration between Stanislav Knot of the Czech Republic and me. My original design had just one solution (as I intended). But Stan saw my design and thought the three pieces could form another symmetrical shape. With some adjustments to the shapes, this proved to be true. Little did we realise that there were two more possible solutions when I sent the puzzle to Ken Johnson of Canada and Rex Perez of Philippines for testing. Each of them came up with a new and different solution, resulting in a total of 4 possible solutions.

The post Symmetric Shape Puzzles appeared first on JL Puzzles.

The Concentric Arc is a maze puzzle.  On both discs  there are curved channels cut out. These form 3 layers of “concentric circles” spanning out from the centre. The puzzle is made of trespa, a strong and durable material widely used for home table surfaces. The puzzle is precision laser cut and the quality of construction and finish is very good.

To solve, one needs to rotate the two discs (held together at the centre by screw) and navigate a rivet “floating” along the maze channels to a point where it can be fully removed. And to remove the rivet, the round hole on the top disc must coincide with a similar hole on the bottom disc.

OH NO!, another maze puzzle which i can’t solve?

When I first looked at the Concentric Arc, it reminded me of the Cross & Crown, Dr Goetz Schwandtner’s IPP34 Exchange Puzzle. This is another maze puzzle with two similar looking discs having all the cut-outs and such. However the latter is a N’ary style puzzle, requiring a lot more moves in a particular sequential fashion. Moreover I was not able to solve the Cross & Crown successfully either.

Nonetheless as I fiddled with the Concentric Arc, I found it to be less intimidating than I initially thought. In fact, after several minutes of play, I managed to remove the rivet. But to really solve a puzzle fully, you must be able to return the puzzle to the original state, at least one senior seasoned puzzler has exclaimed. Here is where I had a tad more problem than before. I had forgotten the moves. So I thought again with my random fiddling, I would be able to get the rivet back in place somehow. But this was not to be for quite a while, in fact quite a long while.

The post Concentric Arc appeared first on JL Puzzles.

OMPIC was James Dalgety’s IPP37 Exchange Puzzle. I have met James during the past IPPs and also corresponded with him on occasions. His Exchange Puzzles have always been rather interesting, intriguing and challenging. Take for example his past exchange puzzles that I have played with; the Perplexing Palace Puzzle and Dot Box. Incidentally the Dot Box also won the Jury First Prize in the IPP35 Puzzle Design Competition. And for those interested to learn more about puzzles, their history and classification, James Dalgety also runs the Puzzle Museum, a private collection of tens of thousands of puzzles, which started in 1886.

REALLY A ONE MINUTE PUZZLE?

First off, the OMPIC looks very much like a hollow cube that has been pressed from all three sides.  It looks bent and squashed! Yes, it was intended this way. The OMPIC was produced for James by Vaclav Obsivac of Vinco puzzles. Made of two types of wood, the puzzle measures about 5cm all round. Construction, fit and finish is very good. And during play there was no jamming of the pieces even tho the tolerances were cut quite tightly.

GETTING THE CUBE INSIDE

The goal is to first “build” a cube with the four odd-shaped pieces inside the squashed hollow cube/cage. Can it be done in a minute? Well, I am sure some expert puzzlers could, but I certainly coudn’t. In fact I took about 8-9 minutes to solve the thing! To get the cube into the cage, one needs to know how to first form a regular cube. Now this already took a couple of minutes alone.

The next challenge is of course to remember the orientation of the pieces and then figure out how to insert each of the pieces into the cage. The cut-outs on each of the sides of the cage are identical rectangular shaped. They do (intentionally) pose an obstruction to the entry of some pieces and a certain order of movements is needed.

Initially I tried the usual random sort of thing and of course that got me nowhere. Some thinking is required. Given there are only four pieces, the logic and steps and what needs to be done while challenging, are not overly difficult. Some of the pieces can only go inside the cage in a certain way. And one needs to make sure the last piece can be inserted without hindrance. The question is -How?

The OMPIC is an interesting and fun puzzle to solve and it has IMHO just about the right level of difficulty. Not to mention the puzzle displays very nicely and even comes with its own ring support which holds it at the correct (tilted) angle.

The post OMPIC appeared first on JL Puzzles.

The Security Lock is manufactured by German based board games and puzzle maker Siebenstein-Spiele. It measures about 13.5cm tall (including the shackle), 11.5cm wide and 1.7cm thick. It comprises three layers of laser cut wood sandwiching a single acrylic layer all screwed together. The overall quality of construction and fit is very good. All the pieces move and slide smoothly. The Security Lock also comes with a laser cut wooden key.

A puzzle lock?

While the Security Lock is shaped like a lock with shackle and all, it is essentially a sliding block puzzle. This seems to be recent new trend in design. This lock is similar to two other wooden locks in my collection, using a sliding block concept. The “n-ary” locks  and their variants are still around and will remain so, as designers come up with new ones.

The body of the lock acts like a tray holding eight square and rectangle pieces. The layer of acrylic functions as a cover (with some cut-outs) to prevent the sliding pieces from being removed (in order to cheat). The blocks restrain the shackle in its place. The goal is to slide the pieces in such a way that the shackle can slide upwards and be freed.

The key has is useful too. Obviously it does not function like a real lock key does, but it helps to prod and move the blocks around inside the constrained space. The acrylic cut-outs are too small for most adult fingers to shift the blocks.

Solving

The blocks can only move up down left and right. In the starting position, two blocks are obstructing the shackle. The shackle needs to slide upwards to the opened position. So obviously these two must move out of the way for the shackle to slide free. Hence the movement of the rest of the blocks in a certain way to achieve this. I cannot remember how many moves it takes to solve this “puzzle lock” but I would rate this puzzle as much more than a moderately difficult puzzle. Although not frustratingly so. I hit dead ends several times before I figured out the sequence of the moves.

Getting the shackle back to the starting position is a matter of reversing the steps, but similar problems persisted and I had to again try several times before everything went back to their original state. Puzzlemaster of Canada rates it as level 8 – demanding, but I think their assessment is a bit on the high side. I would rate it more a level 6.5.

The post Security Lock appeared first on JL Puzzles.

Design-wise, the YACP is pretty far removed from the usual 2D packing puzzles with its whimsical shaped pieces and the non-use of the linear style we puzzlers are so accustomed to. The YACP consists of a black tray about 9.5cm square with five clovers of different colours as well as a small gray rectangular piece. All acrylic laser cut to exacting standards. Quality of construction, fit and finish is excellent and each of the clovers have a small knob attached for easy handling. Aesthetically the YCAP is pleasing to the eye with the clovers adorning bright colours.  And I must say, having played with the YACP for the good part of an hour, the tolerances between the pieces is very tight indeed.

The object of the YACP is to place the five clovers flat in the tray AND also fit the rectangular piece inside a channel on one of the sides. The tray contains cutouts for each of the clovers, all of which look deceptively similar but with very subtle differences. I wonder if Rik had used some form of software to design this puzzle because those little differences meant I had a number of misses; everything would all fit in nicely including the rectangular piece but the last clover would just not fit into its slot.

One can randomly try all the possible combinations (which I would imagine run into the hundreds) of clovers and rectangle and with persistence, time and luck, eventually arrive at the solution.  This obviously could take a very long time, without the hint of the solution in sight. However, I would suggest that with a bit of logical thinking and experimenting, one can eliminate certain possibilities in terms of the placement of the clovers and solve the puzzle much sooner. At least that’s how I managed to solve the YACP in about 40 minutes.

The post Yet Another Clover Puzzle YACP appeared first on JL Puzzles.

I narrowed the list down to about four to five puzzles and as I was going through each of them, I decided to give Formula a try.  A couple of the others came in the solved state already but my Formula came unassembled. A large number of pieces were outside of its container and loosely strewn about inside the cardboard packaging, while the rest were jumbled up inside the wooden cube.

First off, Formula is Tim Udall’s IPP37 Exchange Puzzle. I had played with one of his other exchange puzzles previously, the Cubic Burr. Formula was made by Vinco Obsivac out of a mixture of different woods not identified. Very well made and finished with all the pieces fitting nicely with pretty tight tolerances. The puzzle has an incredible 27 pieces of varying shapes and sizes (as you can see from the photo)! The goal is to place all 27 pieces flush inside the box with none sticking out. Scary for the uninitiated! The 27 pieces come in ten different sizes, with 7 of them consisting of more than one piece.  Size wise, its about 6cm all cube all round.

Formula was designed by a Mr. Justin Math (I have never heard of him tho’ in the puzzle community, but with a name like that, he must obviously be good at math or a good designer or both).  Strangely, aside from the usual information listed on the packaging about the puzzle, there is that extra bit; “pieces: (a+b=c)3 = 27 bricks”. Not being a maths kind of guy myself, I didn’t quite get what the formula meant and/or its relationship with the puzzle or solution. If anyone can shed some light on what this formula means, please PM me, thanks!

Update 29 Jan 2018 – Paco Molina, a puzzler from Spain has offered the following explanation and analysis of the formula above-

“(a+b+c)^3 = a^3+b^3+c^3+3a^2b+3a^2c+3b^2a+3b^2c+3c^2a+3c^2b+6abc
The formula describes how many pieces are for each type (and their size). And I guess the solution can be obtained by placing the pieces that represents a^ 3, b ^ 3 and c ^ 3 diagonally (bottom-up right-left and forward-back). The solution could be drawn on a piece of paper before solving it or at least part of it and figure the rest. (Well, I guess, because I do not have the puzzle).  It is related to this one that I posted here (L’s Tri-Ls from Vinco) http://puzzlesab.blogspot.com.es/2014/02/ls-tri-ls.html“

Typically of such 3D packing puzzles, I usually try to figure if there was any logical or systematic way to find the solution, without all that mathematics mumbo-jumbo. My first random placing of the pieces inside the box to check out how the pieces would fit resulted in the third photo here. The last small piece sticking out a bit ie wrong solution!

Logic (and my puzzling experience) would indicate that the largest pieces should be at the bottom and allow the smaller pieces to fill the gaps in the middle and towards the top. So I tried this method and surprise surprise, my approach actually worked! On the third attempt to fill the cube, everything went in nicely. A nice a-ha moment for me to end the weekend. But in all that I also realised that I needed to keep a number of pieces with similar dimensions to fill the final layer on top. So my solve I guess was combination of a bit of luck, logic and experience. But more than that, I also think that the puzzle has multiple solutions; otherwise I would not have been able to solve it so quickly!

The post Formula appeared first on JL Puzzles.

The Coffin’s Four Piece Cube is very well made out of white oak and finished with an oil finish to give it a smooth touch and allows the pieces to slide smoothly but remain snug in the solved position. Dimensionally it measures about 6.8cm cube all round. Pretty hefty in the hands. The puzzle comes packed in its own box and even wrapped with orange wrinkled paper. What’s unusual about the puzzle is also that the packaging comes with accompanying notes to the puzzle; which describes the puzzle and gives various references to other publications. A good read for those interested to find out more.

The object of the puzzle is of course to take it apart and put it together again.  This is an interlocking cube after all, and the pieces fit so very well that I took a wee bit of time to find the first piece that moves. After that, it was a matter of tugging at the remaining pieces for them to come apart. Putting it back was not so easy if you scramble the pieces and happen to forget the orientation and positioning of each piece.

The other puzzles I have exchanged with Norton include his Octassembly and Packed Pyramid. Both of which are quite different in design from Coffin’s Four Piece Cube. Norton is a retired maths and computer science professor from Amherst College.

The post Coffin’s Four Piece Cube 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.

Unlike the previous two Push Boxes which I managed to solve it one way or another without help (and within a relatively short time), the Push Box 3 stumped me the moment I got it out of my puzzle cabinet. I was very surprised to see that the drawer was already out-meaning the puzzle was in the solved state. My first thought was that Dr Nightingale had changed his design to make the goal of the puzzle to “close the box” this time, instead of opening it.  So I decided to try to solve it on that basis instead. I must say I spent quite a lot of time on the box over a number of days but couldn’t get anywhere. Like the previous boxes, there is a ball bearing rolling around inside somewhere and the drawer is spring loaded and refused to stay inside. I even entertained the idea that the puzzle may have been damaged during transit from Paris back to Singapore.

Finally I decided to throw in the towel and shot an email to Dr Nightingale to consult him (no pun intended). Dr Nightingale replied to say that the “open box” was already solved; meaning that perhaps the long plane ride had caused the puzzle to open solve itself accidentally. Anyway he gave me some directions as to what to do and after another longish period, suddenly the drawer went in and stayed shut-so it wasn’t damaged after all.

Like the previous two versions of the Push Box, I still have no clue how the mechanism of this puzzle box works. But I am happy to return it to the shelf with the drawer nicely tucked inside the box. Will there be a Push Box 4? Well, I will know when I attend IPP38 this coming August.

The post Push Box 3 appeared first on JL Puzzles.

Needless to say, with the PPWKP, Keith had a couple of new tricks up his sleeve which wasn’t too obvious to me while I played with it. The PPWKP is made from Maple and has a Walnut packing strips screwed to the sides to prevent the puzzle from coming apart accidentally. It even comes with its own numbering.

Although not shown in the photo, Keith did provide a small screw driver for removing the screws in the Walnut strips. The PPWKP measures about 90mm x 90mm x 22mm. Quality and construction is very good and I might add, necessary for a puzzle of this nature, where accuracy of the cuts and fit is paramount. Accompanying the puzzle is a sheet of instructions and some history of the Wedge Key Puzzles.

The object of course is to take apart the 4 jigsaw looking pieces and trick or mechanism for the PPWKP differs from the IPP35 version.  This is a sequential discovery puzzle where you utilise whatever “tools” and parts that come with the puzzle to solve it.  No other external tools are allowed. As mentioned, removal of the walnut strips is necessary so the puzzling begins from that point onwards. The provided screw driver however does not count and honestly wouldn’t help unless you wanted to use it to pry the pieces apart by force.

I would consider this latest design of Keith’s to be rather tricky. It isn’t too difficult once you discover how the mechanism of the puzzle works but finding out the mechanism to it is the fun part. Surprisingly, it took me longer than I had expected to solve; I wasn’t paying enough attention

The post Paris Pinned Wedge Key Puzzle appeared first on JL Puzzles.

The puzzle in question is The Melting Tile, which also happens to have been the IPP37 Exchange Puzzle of puzzle/puzzle books collector Yee Dian Lee of Malaysia. I would imagine most puzzlers would have heard of the famous Melting Block puzzle designed by Tom O’Beirne, which has seen different variants made by different puzzle craftsmen over the years. The Melting Block is a 3D packing puzzle that requires a puzzler to fit a ninth block into a box which already contains 8 other block pieces (of varying shapes) with no internal spaces/voids. Sounds impossible right? Yes and No. Bill Cutler describes it as such:

The Melting Block is more of a paradox then a puzzle. The eight pieces fit together easily to form a rectangular block 57 x 87 x 132. This fits into the box with a little room all around, but looks to the casual observer to fill up the box completely. When the ninth piece is added to the group, the pieces can be rearranged to make a 58 x 88 x 133 rectangular solid. (This second construction is a little more difficult). This is a great puzzle to show to “non-puzzle people” and is one of my favorites.

Goh Pit Khiam applied this same principle and came up instead with a 2D version the goal is to remove 7 pieces that fills a tray completely, rearrange them and fit in an 8th red piece…and completely fill up the tray again…again seemingly impossible. Quite a design feat I might add, and burr tools is not something you can use here for this sort of design.

When Oscar came to Singapore and we had an informal second Singapore Puzzle Party, Oscar played with The Melting Tile and managed to solve it over dinner. I decided to give my copy of this Exchange Puzzle a try, but (fortunately or unfortunately) with the benefit of knowing the hint for solving such a puzzle…which Oscar alluded to during his solve.

With a hint or not, this is one of those puzzles which can be solved with some persistence. Given the fact that it has only 7+1 red piece to fit into a squarish tray, it is not such an impossible task as one would imagine. Both solving and un-solving and placing the pieces back to where they belong doesprovide some degree of challenge, easy for some, difficult for others.  But notwithstanding, a nice puzzle to confound non-puzzlers and even puzzlers alike. I love it when people give that look of bewilderment on their faces when they see the small red piece fit inside the tray with the rest…”gosh, how’s that possible?”

The post The Melting Tile appeared first on JL Puzzles.

Now back to the puzzle; the Eye Fill Burr is shaped oval like an eye and the instructions come as followings: “Swap out one piece of the iris and fill the eye with the pupil”. The entire puzzle is 3D printed as Steve usually does with his Exchange and other puzzles, such as his Vapors,  Helical Burr and  Pole Dancers. It is  around 11.5cm x 5.5cm x 4.5cm in size.  As you can see from the photos, the puzzle comes assembled with three pieces of the blue iris and separately there is another iris-piece and the pupil. When I first took out the puzzle, I thought that the separate blue piece was a spare, just in case someone broke one of the other pieces during play. But I realised during play that actually the 4th piece was to substitute one of the three inside the eye. And you need to add the black pupil piece in as well.

Well, what resembles a free-form looking puzzle is really an interlocking burr using the triangular format on the inside, with the frame and pieces shaped appropriately to resemble an eye. While only three pieces in the frame during the start position, removal is not a simple as it seems. I did have to manipulate the pieces around a bit to figure out how best to remove one of the three identical pieces. Rotations appear to be necessary but once you have figured out the orientation of the pieces relative to the frame, removal of the pieces is not as difficult as one would imagine, but nonetheless the execution can be rather tricky. It did take me a while to get it right. Now for the re-assembly with the pupil, it is harder since now four (instead of three) pieces need to be inside the frame. Again, some thinking through how the pieces should go and it becomes fairly manageable. I am not sure about this but I think a slight bit of force may be necessary to insert the black pupil since the puzzle is 3D printed and the tolerances are not as tight and precise as wooden burrs finely cut and crafted in a jig.  I hope I wasn’t doing it wrong tho’. All in, I think Steve came up with a great (and unique) concept for the design and nicely executed.

The post Eye Fill Burr appeared first on JL Puzzles.

Like the Straight Up two years ago, French Point’s objective is for the puzzler to open and close the blade. But David has upped his ante a notch. What is quite different now for the French Point is that the “blade” this time is actually made of metal, not plastic as in the Straight Up. Three layers of thin aluminium (I think) sheets joined together form the entire length of the blade. The handle while plastic, retains that lacquer covered shiny look. The blade has some curved cut-outs which looks (very) precision cut;  by CNC cutter maybe? Could David have used a real  razor blade for his puzzle? Well, maybe since there is machine cutting anyway, but it might have been too dangerous for play! All in, very nicely executed and the quality and finish is very high; even the box it comes in looks expensive.

The French Point comes unsolved, so the blade is locked into the handle. Without going into too much detail about how the mechanism works, which surely will be a spoiler for sure, a series of tilt and flip motions are necessary to unfold the blade. One can hear some rattling noise inside and you know for certain that there is something restraining the blade. It didn’t take me too long to feel my way to the solution-since nothing is visible on the outside and obviously trial and error here and there is required to solve this puzzle. But I had a bit of trouble and it took me a tad longer to fold the thing back together, even tho’, ironically, I can now see the “hidden” locking mechanism and how the trick works. I reckon there is an efficient and correct way to get the blade open in a jiffy and I thought I had nailed it. But still it eludes me now and again.

If you are interested to get a copy, its available from David’s website at US$70/-.

The post Another Sharp Looking Puzzle 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 received the  Euro Falle 06 courtesy of Allen Stein during the IPP37 Puzzle Exchange in Paris this past August. This puzzle is shaped like a crescent moon, with the silhouette of a man’s face. Hence the alternative name of La Luna. The puzzle measures about 10.5cm x 8cm x 2.5cm. It is made up of layers of laser cut wood glued and held together by two screws. A top-plate made of acrylic covers a Euro 20 cent coin inside its own recess. On the back is a Euro copper 1 cent coin which is held within its own little hole. Quality of construction and finish is very good and the puzzle feels very thick, heavy and solid. There are identification marks and etchings  on both sides of the puzzle and the detailing is decent.   The object as mentioned is to remove the 20 cent coin from its slot. I guess you could consider it as a wooden puzzle box, just shaped differently.

An initial inspection would seem to suggest that it is impossible to remove the coin, there are no visible exits and all the layers are screwed and glued tight…but then again, there is often a hidden trick to it. Except sadly to say that I wasn’t able to discover it. My other experience with an earlier Euro Falle puzzle was the Euro Falle 03, co-incidentally also an exchange puzzle from Allen two years back at IPP35 in Canada. Now with that one I didn’t have much problem.  The current puzzle I had a lot of problems and after several days of play, I still got nowhere with it. I tried all sorts of stuff, the usual tapping, shaking and of course tried to figure out if the 1 cent coin had anything to do with the solve. In my mind, I had a rough idea of how the puzzle functioned but it was the execution which got the better of me. Nothing seemed to work and I promptly shot an email to Allen asking for a clue. He did come back with an explanation which I still couldn’t grasp (on hindsight, my own inability to understand) and I asked him to clarify.  Allen decided to send over the solution instead.

I wasn’t too surprise when I saw the solution. I just didn’t execute the critical move correctly. With the solution in sight, I solved the Euro Falle 06 in a jiffy. The mechanism has a very neat trick to it I would say that the Euro Falle 06 may even come under the class of Sequential Discovery puzzles, which requires a puzzler to find and use certain tools (that come with the puzzle) to solve it. Can’t say anymore without spoilers. The entire solve takes about 5 steps. But they are not easy steps, again depending on who is solving it. This is one of those puzzles that if you can figure out step 1, the critical step, the rest becomes fairly easy. Unfortunately I was stuck at step 1 for the longest time.

The post Euro Falle 06 (La Luna) Wooden Puzzle appeared first on JL Puzzles.

Dimensionally the Dial measures along each side at about 55mm. Like most Hanayama puzzles, this one is made of cast zinc alloy. Quality of the Dial is very good and despite there being moving parts, I didn’t feel any “looseness” and the puzzle feels heavy and solid in the palm.

The dark triangular portion houses two light coloured “dials” that are pressed flat against each other.  The objective of the Dial is to remove the two dials from the triangular “cage”, which itself can be separated into two parts. So disassembled, there are altogether 4 parts. The dials can rotate on all axes within their housing and you can turn each dial in a counter direction against the other.

This is a level 4 (or 4 stars) difficulty puzzle meaning that it is “Fairly Hard”, with level 5 being “Hard” and level 6 “Very Hard”. Like many Hanayama Cast puzzles where it is not obvious what needs to be done (because the mechanism is hidden), I started with gentle manipulation of the dials and trying to turn them and also tugging at the two pieces that form the triangular cage. The packaging itself also has some cryptic clues “Turn the dials on the front and back, both sides and proceed. It is important not only to go forward, but also to step down one step at a time”…and I duly followed these instructions. And pretty good clues they were too, provided you have a good sense of feel for the pieces.

Without adding any spoilers here for those who have not solved the puzzle, the dials interact with each other and need to be turned in such a way that will enable a release of the dials themselves and the cage. I took approximately ten minutes or so before the various parts started to separate.  I had a pretty good idea of the mechanism holding the parts together…and hence was able to turn both dials and cage to the point where they separated nicely. No force needed whatsoever. Putting everything back together should have been simply the reverse but I had more trouble doing this than taking the Dial apart. And it took me a tad longer before I secure all the parts back to their original positions. The difficulty rating is about right here IMHO; challenging but not frustratingly so. Once you see the progress you are making, persistence will probably take you through the end. Then comes the harder part…reassembly!

The post Hanayama Cast Dial appeared first on JL Puzzles.