“Anchor No. 8” Tangram Puzzle.

Boys and Girls,

I give away my puzzles for free, however, people out there still want cheap… so I got into this Tangram puzzle, which still looked substantial, yet cheap and easy to fabricate.  

Tracking down the puzzles name, I managed to extract this detail off the Internet,

 
I managed to plagiarise this puzzle 

based on the original Chinese 七巧板 puzzle.

Tangram shapes are the seven pieces of a traditional Chinese dissection puzzle, which are created by cutting a square into five triangles (two large, one medium, and two small), one square, and one parallelogram… called Tans. 

A popular use of this puzzle is to see how many of these 95 different shapes you can make with just the 7 Tans, 

... more can be made with additional pieces.
Disclaimer:- While the above picture seems to be associated with this puzzle everywhere, something was lost in the translation as some of the shapes are just impossible to make with the 7 pieces... check the internet for valid tans.

Just as I was ready to post this puzzle and preparing a few extra happy-snaps, I thought I was a smart-rrs and attempted a few of the tangrams in the picture above… soly hhit… change that to a dumb-RRRRRRs… I somehow bluffed one and then got stumped… thank the gods for Google search.

 

First step was to take a few selective examples and make them up… this first one represents a fish,

(more particularly a rare Devils Hole pupfish)... and I even found a kangaroo 

(another rare marsupial called a Wondiwoi tree-kangaroo).

I then made up a few selective more and let you figure out what they are,

I quickly realised there was more to this puzzle than I thought.

 

Then it was a case of update to my SketchUp model with some examples… this may help any that tried the above identification but failed,

(if you can read the text or check the A4 solution).

 

Short of the above bit of trivia I have made a number of puzzles that can be transformed into several different shapes (solutions as opposed to tantagrams as described above). One of them being a recently published project called Lightning Conductor.

 

I was going to just summarise them all into one project, but if anyone is actually interested, that could have been confusing, so I shall post them as individual puzzle projects.

 

This one is referred to as Anchor No.8, being the 8th in The Anchor Puzzle Book publication.

This particular puzzle primarily (amongst all the other shapes) converts a square into a rectangle,

unless it’s already a rectangle, then vice versa.

 

For ease of manufacture, I laser cut indirectly from my SketchUp model with the bounding box and engraving added while passing through the CorelDraw software onto the laser cutting software.

 

As there may be someone out there without a cutting laser, it can easily be cut using conventional tools with either 90° or 45° cuts.  Suggest you pick a base length, lets call it “X”, and all measurements will be X, X/2 or X/4.  For this set I have chosen a base of 100mm,

 

and for this imperial (ugh), 3”

You can choose increments of 1/16’, but that’s be as stewpid as the ridiculous imperial…. KISS!

 

For this puzzle, I’ve chosen to be a nice guy

 

and provided a frame for both shapes on flip sides, however, you can raise the degree of difficulty by holding back on the frame… or just suggest solving outside the frame… without the guidance of the frame, it’s degree of difficulty is raised a tad.

 

The large ones are buffed, however, the recipients of the smaller ones have to endure all those MDF splinters…not that I’m trying to be a,

but buffing the small ones create missiles… I have my helmet on but crawling on the floor looking for lost pieces is worse than walking through a mine field sober. 

 

Not that there much to it, but this is the 3DW model,

if only for the metric/imperial measurements and what is a puzzle without a  documented solution (including the tangrams) or just the tangrams (stand alone).

 

Anyone interested in my puzzles (or other authors’), you can see them all here in my “Puzzle Collection” .

If interested in any of mine (LBD), measurements can be made available on request for anyone not familiar with SketchUp… though a working knowledge of SketchUp’s navigation (as opposed to its design/use features) and access to 3DW could be of benefit.

All the solutions to my puzzles can be found at this link...
*** Measurements and further details can be provided on request. ***
Christmas is coming and puzzles make a great stocking stuffer... for all ages.  
Kids love ‘em and most of us are still kids.

 

 

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