The Square Brick.

Boys and Girls,

 

This puzzle dates back to when Adam and Eve were still planting apple seeds in The G_E.

It was this puzzle that started my penchant towards my dark side of deceiving people by sleight of hand back in the late 60's… and I refused to agree with the cops that it was stealing, and preferred to call it “puzzling”.

 

For nostalgia, I decided to recreate the puzzle back in March 2019 and posted it that month on LJ.

I usually make a lot of my stuff out of laser cut MDF, primarily for speedy repeatability… However, after completing this puzzle, I decided to prove to myself that it was purely laziness rather than capability of MDF vs solids.

 

Here is my saga migrated across from LJ. 

 

 

Boy and Girls,

 

Got a bout of inspiration from my last project 日 本 の パ ズ ル and decided to fulfil a lifelong ambition of building a larger version of my cube puzzle (45mm x 45mm x 45mm),

which bought from Bernard's Magic shop in Melbourne while I was at uni (circa 1967-68).

 

The new big one has dimensions of 120mm x 120mm x 120mm and weighs a ton… well nearly, and that’s why it's tagged as The Brick!

 

I won't bore you with the build details other than, this was also out of MDF and laser cut and dowel aligned…

one of the MDF sheets (300mm x600mm) off the laser.

 

As it was imported into SketchUp, the measurements are readily available for making out of solid timber by anyone interested in puzzles…

 

After making the full Monty,

I decided to do a mini-me (60mm x 60mm x 60mm) of it.

I liked it so much that I made another…

actually that's BS as  I stained it black and I didn't know whether I liked it or not so I made another one to stain black… but I decide not to… no, not to make it but stain it!

Gave the big daddy a coat of tung oil

 

and let the little nippers frolic around naked.

 

Eventually the three of them were slapped around on the buffing wheel to put a shine on their faces. Buffed with tripoli, diamond dust and carnauba waxes which was no mean feat as it took a bloody lot of hours as I also buffed the inside faces.

 

The little black stained one turned out to be two puzzles in one. The first challenge was to find the bloody thing amongst my black cabinets…

 

jester4977 proved that fabrication was not limited to lasers by making my previous puzzle in about 2 hours out of solid timber using conventional woodworking tools.  Well not happy to be made a joke of, I thought I'd try my hand at solid timber on the table saw.  Bad move… I belong to the group that measures 3 times cuts once, stuffs that cut up and repeats the cycle about 3 times until I eventually measure once and cut 3 times… this latter way, at least then one may actually work.
The solids were cut on the tablesaw using my dado stack (15mm).

I made a lot of oopsies…

Brought about by,

and that is just a list of problems I couldn't remember…

 

I tried to make a "solid" puzzle out of burl (not sure what type it was)

but after a few stuff ups I ran out of that timber and had to finish it using pine… rather than waste what was "workable".

 

I have made a video of assembling the pieces and for those that hate videos and love to read, you can read about it here.

 

AND… If you are not a fan of puzzles don't read this post and just sit back and wait for the next "puzzle" I have in the pipeline….