Friday, May 21, 2021

Chocolate Box By George Bell

George has done a wonderful job with this puzzle!  It will first throw you for a loop until you get the idea of correctly placing all the chocolates in the box without touching the lid!  It's a very clever design and well worth picking up a copy from George's Etsy Shop 'PolyPuzzles'



Here's George's description:


"Pack six identical pieces into a cylindrical box. When you close the lid, it should not touch any pieces. This puzzle is not difficult but requires some "out of the box" thinking.


In 2020 I redesigned the box to make it more obvious when the lid is not down. Each piece is made from four truncated rhombic dodecahedra, also called edge-beveled cubes. The rhombic dodecahedra have a diameter of 19 mm. The puzzle is mentioned in an article in CFF #108 (Cubism For Fun)."


See also Kevin's blog post




I have now added this from George:

"There is an interesting story about Chocolate Box.  It was in the IPP design comp 4 years ago.


I 3D printed the pieces, but I asked Stephen Chin to turn the box.  This was a great idea except for one thing.  The timing was such that I sent Nick Baxter the pieces and Chinny the box, and the puzzle never came together until it got to the San Diego IPP.


Surprisingly, the fit was near perfect!  However, Chinny had talked about making a two sided lid which would fit only the solution in one orientation, but would fit the false solution when flipped over.  This subtle point wasn't included in the puzzle description.


So the problem was that people were confused by this puzzle because they didn't notice the lid subtlety.  It was too late to change anything in the description.  But anyway the version with the nice wood box turned out great, and I still have one copy.


You can see the 2-sided lid in the above photo.  Also the false solution (in the photo except one piece is removed) appears to fit pretty well (all pieces below the rim on the box)."



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