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.

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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).

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