Model #360 is Ready

They said it couldn’t be done! They said it would cost millions of lives! They said I was crazy to try! Well, I showed them! Mwa-ha-ha-ha! Model #360 is finally done:

And here’s a picture of the top showing the logo with the blue ink that takes me forever to add:

It’s pretty hefty by the way, 11 1/2 ounces (325 grams). I have enough metal parts to make a hundred in total but will be releasing them in small batches of ten or twenty at a time. Fabricating the internal pieces and assembling the complete puzzle gets tedious after a while and is fairly time-consuming.

This initial production launch will be limited to 100 pieces, each hand-numbered and initialed. If it is popular enough, I may do secondary production runs in different colors or with different materials (delrin maybe) but the secondary runs won’t have any of the labor-intensive details: e.g., no logo infilled with ink, no hand-numbering and initialing, etc.

But that’s the future; back to the present. The Model #360 is now available on my Etsy store and will soon be available at other online stores as well. I’ll post an update on that as soon as I have more information to share.

This is as good a time as any to explain some of the factors guiding my puzzle designs in general and for the #360 specifically. First, I’m trying to find that elusive ideal balance between puzzle difficulty and elegance of solution. I have some fantastically difficult puzzles in my collection whose solution isn’t particularly elegant and that means they just aren’t very satisfying. And I have some trivially simple puzzles that also aren’t very satisfying. So one of my goals is to come up with a really difficult puzzle whose solution feels clever and elegant.

A related goal is that the solution feels “fair”. That is, given some ingenuity and patience, the puzzler has a reasonable chance of finding the solution. I think one way of making a puzzle “fair” is for it to give some kind of tactile, auditory, or other feedback so that the puzzler can test solution ideas. I really like Gary Foshee’s Lunatic Lock for this reason. Not surprisingly, I’m not a fan of puzzle mechanisms based on magnets because they tend to immobilize internal parts that might otherwise rattle around and give you a clue to what’s going on inside. Plus they encourage people to whack their puzzles and I feel a well designed puzzle mechanism should be solvable with a minimum of force, precisely applied.

Another factor is the overall esthetics of the puzzle. I personally like the appearance of machined aluminum, especially when it’s plated or anodized, but “puzzle esthetics” also includes things that are even more subjective such as how tight the tolerances are, how the puzzle feels in your hand, its proportions and weight, even its color and shape. I spent a lot of time on the #360, probably too much, trying out different hole sizes, trying out different fillet radii on its edges, different height-to-width-to-depth ratios, etc. When a designer succeeds at all these things, the resulting puzzle looks and feels “cool”. For example, I think Rainer Popp’s T8 is the coolest lock puzzle I know.

One last factor plays a big role in my designs and although it’s something I care a lot about, I think I’m probably in the minority. I really like knowing how a puzzle works and seeing all of the internal mechanism components; I want to be able to take a puzzle apart down to its individual pieces. The initial thrill of finding a puzzle’s solution is wonderful but I also want the more prolonged enjoyment of understanding and appreciating how all the components interact and interlock. For me, that is total puzzle nerd bliss.

On my first puzzle, the #808, I tried to find a way to allow full disassembly and in my initial design you could see and remove all the internal bits and pieces. The problem was that those bits and pieces would often fall out and instantly get lost so I had to change the design. With the #360, I think I’ve come up with a good design that lets you take all the internal pieces out. You can still lose those pieces so be forewarned that you probably want to do the final disassembly over a tray. But if you’re like me, I think you’ll really enjoy being able to see the internal mechanism laid bare.

By the way, since there are small pieces inside, I’ve put a warning on the puzzle’s label so that customers will keep it away from young children. Frankly I can’t imagine it being a real risk – and I can’t count how many other puzzles there are with tiny pieces inside and no warning – but it would be horrible if something bad happened so I added the label.

Well this has turned out to be a much longer post than the short announcement I had planned. Now I’m going to scoot over to Etsy and add a new listing. Happy Puzzling!