I recently acquired this terrific puzzle that Allen crafted from Cherry and used as his Exchange for IPP 29 San Francisco.
Stewart wrote:
“According to my records, I made and sold six of these in 1995, but I did not
save any design notes. Perhaps I thought they were not worth saving. I considered it a lost design until one showed up recently in my daughter’s collection. This puzzle has the usual complications introduced by crooked notches. It has two kinds of pieces, three of each, and the two halves are mirror image. The two halves mate along the one sliding axis.”
Eric made a run of these in Purpleheart and here’s what he had to say about this cool design:
Designated STC #116, this Coffin puzzle was Allen Rolf's IPP29 exchange contribution. Mr. Coffin himself doesn't seem to have many records of it, stating in his book that he only made a few and had no records of ever selling any copies. I'm not sure how Allen revived the design, but I'm glad he did because this is a very interesting puzzle. Thanks to him for giving me permission to make a batch of them, and of course all puzzlers and puzzlemakers owe a debt to Mr. Coffin for so generously allowing others to copy and build upon his groundbreaking work.
The puzzle itself looks fairly simple...twelve notches in six sticks. The interesting part is that the notches are not only slanted, but tilted as well. Therefore each piece must be in the proper relative position as well as the proper rotational position. The angles involved are subtle, but if as little as one piece is so much as turned around, the puzzle will not assemble! Tricky and a lot of fun to solve.
Construction-wise, this puzzle gave me a lot of headaches. Getting the angles nailed was tricky. The jigs alone took me a couple days to work out. At one point I thought to myself "Feh, if Allen can figure it out, so can I!" Then I remembered Allen is a brain surgeon. Sometimes it pays to keep in mind that most of my customers are waaay smarter than I am.”
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