ShutOut Puzzle.

Boys and Girls,

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water workshop,

Glad I got that boring woodworking project of lathe milling machine behind me so I could get back to everyone’s favourites… puzzles!

 

While gathering info on my Neptune Puzzle, I blundered across this puzzle also created by Osanori Yamamoto. It wasn’t so much the look of the puzzle that got my juices flowing, but rather its classification of difficulty level of 10.  Now if that was out of 11 or 12, it’d be no big deal, but when it peaks at 10, this is a puzzle to treat with respect... as all the packing puzzles I have presented previously, range from around 6 to 8… this venomous installment had me intrigued.

 

Not being a total egotist, I expected a difficulty level of 10 might outlive this 75yo geri', consequently I set my quest to finding a solution for it.

I came across 2 videos and was enthused with “solvability”, and from the brochures, 

created the following SketchUp model

 

with this teaser of how the pieces are oriented for  inserted into the box,

though not necessarily their final resting place which is,

 

After being inspired by refraining from using alignment toothpics in my 6 Disc Box Puzzle, I opted to abandoned my toothpick alignment for the pieces,

(the one on the right my left).

 

As I was creating the solution in SketchUp from the videos (I capitulated in trying to solve this one solo), I found that the videos were easy to follow getting the first 4 pieces into the box… and the last 2, are just a simple 3 move slip in.  

Unfortunately due to obscure viewing blocked by solvers’ hands, after insertion of the first 4 pieces, their internal manipulation left me bamboozled. I’m not blaming the presenters, however, I just couldn’t follow… both videos I watched seemed to crap me out at the same spot.

 

Hell I now had 2 copies (I always make 2) of the puzzle... without the full solution.  

Fortunately I learnt the internal layout from the videos, and after discarding the last 2 pieces,

 

I tried to reverse engineer the remaining internals by manipulating within SketchUp. After a considerable amount of failures, I finished up with what I though was an acceptable solution… it took 38 steps… well worthy of its level 10 difficulty.

I will say that some of the moves have been split into two steps… eg. a move left and down, which one would physically execute as a single step, has been recorded as two steps. However, condensing these, I might have only saved ½ doz steps, making it a 32 step puzzle… still puzzling enough. 

I will admit that once you know about the internal rotational moves (and their direction), subsequent solving is much, much easier… until a few days later when age makes one reach for the solutions again.

 

I made one fatal mistake, by making the puzzle too small… using a base of 12mm, the inner dimensions finished up 37mm³ (allowing 1mm wiggle room in all directions) and if the inserted piece got disoriented, trying to either right or extricate it raised the difficulty by 5 basis points.

Decided to upscale it by 50%... from 2 layers of 6mm MDF (12mm) to 3 layers of MDF (18mm)… the bottom line was I could manage to insert my stubby fat fingers into the openings to remove the recalcitrant pieces while previously I couldn’t even reach in with my pinkie,

… immediately reducing the degree of difficulty by 6 basis points… an overall win, I thought.

 

While this resize could have been done in CorelDraw, I resorted to SketchUp,

using the scale tool in order to permit tweaking the box’s thickness, as the 50% ↑ changed the thickness from 3mm to 4.5mm, which would have buggered up my finger joints unless I dress a sheet of  6mm MDF to 4.5mm… which to me would have been nearly as catastrophic as when I defected to iPhone from Samsung a few months ago.

 

For any masochists out there, the 3DW model can be accessed/viewed/downloaded from,

or the 1.5 resize,

and for those that hate videos, the A4 PDF Solution.

 

 

 

 

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