It’s been over two years since I came out with my last major puzzle, Model #360, and that’s certainly not what I had planned. Instead of just focusing on a single design and getting it out quickly, I’ve been working on four and progress on all of them has, predictably, suffered. However, the end to this long dry spell is in sight. Here is a picture of a working prototype of my next puzzle, Model […]
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“The Pennyhedron Revisited” Revisited
At the end of my last post I talked about George Bell’s fascinating paper, “The Pennyhedron Revisited”, and a puzzle he mentions in it called “De Doe Dak Ka”. Stuart Gee designed it and George reports that it is the first known four-piece pennyhedron, having been introduced in 2007 at IPP27. It’s a very cool coordinate motion puzzle of four identical pieces. I started playing around with the shape, initially making a sphere and adding […]
MoreMo’ CoMo
I continue to be intrigued (obsessed?) with coordinate motion (como) puzzles and came across a really clever design of James Dalgety’s. He is one of the living legends in the puzzle design community and is well known for having started Pentangle Puzzles & Games in 1971 and more recently for curating the Puzzle Museum, an immense collection of puzzles dating back to 320 BC. Here is a paper he submitted to the 11th “Gathering for […]
MoreTom Jolly’s “Flange 77A” Puzzle (Updated 6/3/20)
I’ve been plugging away at three designs to succeed my earlier Model #808 and Model #360 puzzles – it’s been slow going. Every time I think I’ve resolved the last of the usability, aesthetic, manufacturability, and packaging issues, something comes up. I’m on the eleventh revision on one design, the nineteenth on the second, and the twenty-second on the third. Believe it or not, I’m not complaining – I love working through design problems – […]
MoreReCube ReVisited
Last February I blogged about Viktor Genel’s “ReCube” puzzle and the fun I had making cubical and spherical versions of it. Then, last August, I got to talking to George Bell about coordinate motion puzzles generally and about ReCube in particular. After some emails back and forth on how to model the spherical version in OpenSCAD, I realized I had omitted an internal vertex and the faces it anchors. I hate it when that happens. […]
MoreStewart Coffin’s “Burr Muda” Puzzle
I’ve been having a lot of fun with coordinate motion puzzles, some of which I’ve even blogged about. Well, one of the coolest is a Stewart Coffin design (STC-112) called “Burr Muda” and it looks like this: One of the things I really like about this design is that all six pieces are identical; that appeals to my sense of symmetry I suppose. Second, since it’s a coordinate motion puzzle, those six pieces must define […]
MoreThe Calibron Twelve Block Puzzle (Updated 4/19/20)
This is a pretty well known story to the puzzler community but if you’ve never heard it before, here’s the condensed version: in 1932 Theodore Edison, youngest son of famous inventor Thomas Edison, created a puzzle of twelve rectangular blocks and named it, you guessed it, “The Calibron Twelve Block Puzzle”. Here’s what his instructions said: “The problem is to arrange the twelve blocks to form a single large rectangle. Any rectangle, (including the square), […]
MoreSnowflake Problem
Remember that Snowflake puzzle of Robert Yarger’s (a.k.a “Stickman”) that I blogged about last October? Well, it turns out it has two solutions, a two move solution and a seven move solution. I messed up the design for my version and mine doesn’t allow the seven move solution, only the two move solution. A few weeks ago a customer told me about this (that Stickman’s version had a seven move solution and that mine only […]
MoreCoordinate Motion
Or is it “Coordinated Motion”? The latter makes more sense but the former seems to be the accepted term for describing burr-like puzzles whose assembly requires two or more pieces to be moved simultaneously and continuously. I guess I’ll just go with the flow and call them “coordinate motion puzzles.” One of the most beautifully made puzzles I’ve ever come across, coordinate motion or otherwise, is the machined aluminum / joined wood / metal 3D […]
MoreWebsite Update (Updated 2/14/19)
It’s been a busy winter and I’m making steady progress on my next puzzle design (I’m on version fourteen). Once I’ve finalized the design I will post some news and pictures of the prototype. In the mean time, this is a short post to let everyone know that a) I’ve switched domain registrars and unless there’s been a bad screwup you shouldn’t notice any changes at all; and b) I’ve added a Newsletter feature to […]
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