Positively Pristine Plastic Puzzles Prove....

That Practice Makes Perfect

Adin's 3-piece Board Burr
Adin has let me know that he got this from PWBP
It is Evgenia's Knot by Aleksandr Leontev (a brilliant designer)

This will be a quickie. I am not up to much puzzling or writing having had my last remaining pussycat get very ill and had to be put down a few days ago. All I can bring myself to do is write about a few quick puzzles I have played with to take my mind off things.

My friend Adin has bought himself a 3D printer and has been designing and making new toys at an incredible rate. I am amazed at the ease with which he has taken to it and made some wonderful challenges. He was kind enough to give a few away at the MPP and I couldn't resist despite knowing the effect a proliferation of plastic would have on Mrs S. With the cat getting ill, I needed something to take my mind of it and also something not hugely challenging. A 3-piece board burr should be just the ticket.  I don't think Adin has named it. It's not a hugely tough disassembly puzzle but there is an interesting sequence to it. I decided to take it apart and scramble the pieces to see whether the 3 pieces would defeat me as an assembly challenge.

Doesn't look too hard

The fun thing for me is that the position of the individual pieces is pretty easy to work out. I was able to assemble any 2 pieces into the correct position in each case quite easily. This meant that it should be a relatively simple process to assemble 3. It may be simple for Adin and Rich (and maybe all of the rest of you) but I am truly awful at assembly. It was possible for me but took me an embarrassing 30 minutes! After practicing a few times, I thought I had the system for it and decided to attempt a pure assembly puzzle with no muscle memory of a disassembly first.

Random un-named 3-piece board burr

Allard has also been printing puzzles with abandon and had left a few to be picked up at the MPP. I couldn't resist this one which was in a little bag of pieces. Having had some modicum of success with Adin's puzzle, I finally got the courage to try this one. Again, I was able to assemble any 2 pieces into position as there were no other options possible. But when it came to the 3 pieces together, I found that there was very little possible movement of any pair to make space for the third one to be placed. I tried every possible combination as my starting two but it seemed impossible to place the third one. There was just no space to get them to intertwine. Time for a little think© which I am sure was what Allard had intended. Luckily, my time with the other one had strengthened my bwain for a short amount of time and I was able to find a rather nicely hidden path to get my assembly.

I'm a genius? Almost certainly not!

Now I was full of confidence, it was time to attempt a new concept - Adin's changing piece burr:

Adin's changing piece burr

Yes, it's "just" a six piece burr! But no, it's not! Straight away in the picture above, you should see a joint in the pieces that should not be there in a standard 6 piece burr. I noticed it straight away and realised that this might be a bit of a challenge. After all these years of playing with burrs, I am actually quite good at disassembly (as long as the level is not astronomically high). The burr came apart in one of the standard methods (splitting into 2 halves before dismantling each pair of three:

2 oddities are visible

As soon as you see the interior of the pieces then you can see something odd. One of the pieces has an odd shaped segment and another is not based on the standard 2x2x6 grid. The whole point of this is that one piece comes apart and the parts assembled with another into a different set:

Pull one part off and plug it into another

A new 6 piece burr

Full of self confidence, I attempted the assembly and very quickly hit a brick wall! Maybe my limit for assembly is 3 pieces? I initially struggled to find even any assemblies, let alone any solutions. I had hoped that with the very odd grid sizes of two of the pieces, it might be quite simple to find the piece positions. It took me a half day to find even one! In retrospect, Burrtools tells me that there are 5 assemblies but only one solution with 5 moves to split it in two and 8 for the first piece removal. That half day was not misspent - the assembly that I had found was by luck the correct one and after another hour of fiddling I managed to put it together. Adin is a genius (joining Derek and Shane in that hall of fame). 

It would appear that practice makes perfect! Now if only I could stick to just one type of puzzle and keep going with that until I got really good at it. But you all know that I am easily distracted by squirrels and other puzzles!