With the help of George Bell, I was able to make many of these types of puzzles. I had decided when making these that I would use 1” cubes with dowels pinning each joint for strength, maybe overkill but I had made a Four Piece variant years ago that suffered a broken joint and I swore to never have that happen again!
Recently I was given a couple of recent Stewart Coffin designs that are as of this writing unpublished. Special thanks go out to Tanner on the Puzzle Discord.
Stewart Wrote:
“After discovering that Charnley and Strickland had thoroughly investigated
many possible puzzle constructions using cubes bonded by half-faces or quarter-faces, I decided to redirect my experiments to novel variations not included in their report.”
First up is this wonderful design #X-76A ‘Your Turn’ expertly crafted by Legendary Puzzle Craftsman Bart Buie! This was Rob Jones exchange puzzle in 2018.
Special thanks to Nick Baxter for this puzzle identification.
It took me several minutes to figure out how to assemble this puzzle and then insert it into the finely crafted box (with mitered corners) and finally close the lid!
If you’ve ever tried to solve these types of puzzles you’ll understand how confusing they really are. I’ve been crafting puzzles since early 2000 and Bart had long since turned his focus away from puzzlemaking so I was never able to acquire one of his puzzles, until now!
The following puzzle is called ‘Threepence’ Stewart Coffin design #261
Stewart wrote:
“It could be considered a sequel to Three-Piece Block #38.
Perhaps it could come with hexagonal container of some sort.”
Well wouldn’t you know, that long time puzzler Saul Broboff used that exact idea for his IPP exchange puzzle!
Once you assemble this one you can insert it into the coffee cup!
As I mentioned above I’ve made many of these designs as once your set up for these, cutting the cubes, bevelling the edges and then drilling holes in each corner it becomes more like an assembly line. It would seem like Stewart might have finally finished with this curious design many decades after developing his famous design #38 ‘Three-Piece Block’ puzzle but who knows what he’s cleverly passing his time with, my thinking is he’s probably coming up with yet another design awaiting some skilled craftsman to come along and be inspired by his design skills!
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