Canary by Alfons Eyckmans

This is another very difficult 10 piece tray puzzle by Alfons, as you get closer to the solve you typically end up with that one last piece that just won’t fit!

My copy is all wood, there are other copies made with a printed tray..

Rubens by Alfons Eyckmans

This very difficult 13 piece tray puzzle was named in honour of Peter Paul Rubens so I’ve added the following from Wikipedia:

Sir Peter Paul Rubens - (28 June 1577 – 30 May 1640) was a Flemish artist and diplomat from the Duchy of Brabant in the Southern Netherlands (modern-day Belgium).

He is considered the most influential artist of the Flemish Baroque tradition. Rubens's highly charged compositions reference erudite aspects of classical and Christian history. His unique and immensely popular Baroque style emphasized movement, colour, and sensuality, which followed the immediate, dramatic artistic style promoted in the Counter-Reformation. Rubens was a painter producing altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. He was also a prolific designer of cartoons for the Flemish tapestry workshops and of frontispieces for the publishers in Antwerp.

Rules of Attraction - Laszlo Molnar by Brian Menold - Wood Wonders

I recently received this puzzle and of course was eager to fiddle with it, here’s Brian’s description from Wood Wonders :

“This was one of the 2019 entries into the IPP Design Contest from Laszlo Molnar. A really cool idea that seems almost too easy. Until you try to assemble the pieces into a cube and find out that there are other forces working against you! Rare earth magnets imbedded within the pieces work against each other to keep the cube misaligned. Can you find the one solution that stays together? Made from various domestic and exotic hardwoods.

Each of these puzzles has almost $20 worth of magnets in it and it was time consuming inserting the magnets, but these were still a lot of fun to make. Watching the pieces fly around the bench when I was least expecting it was entertaining, and often startling! Made from a variety of domestic and exotic woods.”

Bad Egg by Alfons Eyckmans

 

I was surprised by this gem of a puzzle recently, as most know Alfons specializes in burr puzzles but this one is a box packing puzzle.

Obviously your goal is to pack all of the pieces into the box, there are four solutions.

Each piece is made by augmenting them with an extra unit attached in different ways.

As with any packing puzzle you’ll get most of the pieces packed in with one that just won’t fit..

Pox Box by Yavuz Demirhan

This puzzle was Designed and Crafted by Yavuz, initially I wasn’t sure but did receive confirmation from Yavuz.

What is really surprising about this diminutive four piece design is the 17 moves required to remove the second piece, very well done Yavuz.

Eric made a run of 45 in 2017 and really went all out on the box with mitered joints and even added slipfeathers!

Here’s his description from Cubicdissection:

“I’ve been thinking about making Pox Box for a while, and was waiting for a time when I could give it the attention it deserves in the workshop. Such a simple design belies how tricky it is to solve...with a level 7.14.7 solution, it's no pushover. I decided on a box with mitered and splined joinery all the way around, and veneered tops on the pieces. Painstaking and time consuming, it was all worth it...the result is gorgeous! This is one puzzle that really catches your eye and is as much fun to solve as the appearance promises.”

Its’ Nuts by Scott Elliot

I recently received this puzzle and it instantly brought me back to when Scott had mentioned his Bolt & Nut design on our ‘Renegade Forum’ that has some ‘screwy’ threads that have nuts that defy explanation, you can literally screw the nuts in two different directions on the same bolt???

My copy is one that appears to be printed much later then Scott’s original IPP versions that were exchanged by IPP Founder Jerry Slocum, as is noted in his blog:

“In May I blogged how I built an enhanced copy of Oskar van Deventer's Cooksey Tribute D puzzle.  Oskar already owned a copy of Cooksey Tribute D, and so did I, so Oskar suggested I send the third as a gift to Jerry Slocum, a renowned puzzle enthusiast and author.

Jerry telephoned me immediately after he'd received the puzzles and asked if I could possibly build 120 copies of the bolt and nuts for the Puzzle Party.  I was thrilled!

We agreed the puzzle needed a name because I had originally adopted "wrong way nut" as a descriptive phrase, not an actual title.  Jerry researched to ensure we wouldn't infringe any trademarks.  I liked his suggestion Its' Nuts because it used an apostrophe in a nonstandard way, which was a subtle puzzle in itself.  Had it been intended as the contraction It's Nuts or a possessive term Its Nuts?

Each nut is embossed with "Its'" on one side and "Nuts" inverted on its opposite side so the puzzle's title appears when the nuts are correctly threaded onto the bolt.  Can you work out the probability of correctly assembling the bolt and its nuts so they say Its' Nuts?  (It's not just 1 in 2, as you might guess.)

It's customary for entries in the Edward Hordern IPP Puzzle Exchange to carry the name of the person exchanging them and the date of the IPP event when they were exchanged.  The bolts I built for Jerry are custom-embossed with IPP32 and the year 2012 on one face, and From Jerry Slocum on an opposite face.

With Jerry's approval, I added my own name to the top of the bolt head to identify myself as the creator.  Pay attention to how thin those letters really are, forming narrow strokes less than 1mm thick.

I deliberately made those hollow areas are narrower than 1mm so they wouldn't be sufficiently wide for the SD300 to apply anti-glue inside those narrow channels.  Consequently the letters are glued into the solid bolt head when the SD300 builds them, forming subtle outlines that can only be read by carefully examining the sheen of the top surface.

Screw threads need a slick finish, but the SD300 ordinarily builds layers with sharply-defined edges so I dipped every single nut and bolt in Weld-On 2007.

The solvent smooths and seals the layers, but after a few uses the solvent also tends to fog up the glossy top surface--an undesirable side effect.  To avoid fogging I learned how to dip the bolt only up to the sides of the hex-shaped head, but that left the side walls of the bolt head with a half-glossy/half-matte appearance.  The solution?  I wiped the side walls with ordinary PVC Pipe Primer from my local plumbing supply--it contains just enough solvents to impart a uniformly glossy appearance, and it includes a neat applicator.

This was a big project.  It took over a week to build all those bolts, and almost two weeks more to build all the nuts.  The nuts were more trouble than the bolts because I had to manually clear 72 layers of leftover support material from the center of each nut, tearing out the layers with a pointed probe as illustrated in this previous blog post.  It went at least twice as fast if I heated the model in my microwave oven for 30 seconds, a tip I learned from Jason Harris.

After the various pieces had been built, I assembled them into completed Its' Nuts sets.

I vacuum packed the bolt sets in groups for convenient shipping to Jerry.

For their final presentation Jerry repackaged Its' Nuts into individual prescription-drug containers, playfully labeled Slocum Pharmacy.  It included a caution, "Be sure to take with 1 grain of salt."

Epilogue...

Jerry Slocum won me over to the name Its' Nuts because the odd placement of the apostrophe struck me as a clever piece of word-play.  He later confessed that it originated as a typo.”

Tutu - Dr. Volker Latussek by Pelikan

 

This puzzle is a very difficult solve with what appears to be such simple pieces!

Here’s the full description by Dr. Latussek at Pelikan:

“A tribute to Yasuhiro Hashimoto… With his designs, Yasuhiro Hashimoto has given friends of mechanical puzzles all over the world deeply felt moments of happiness. When I recently had the opportunity to work with his 4L puzzle for the first time, the thought matured in me to say thank you for the wonderful time that Hashimoto-san gives us. Now I could have sent him a message and somehow put my admiration into more or less appropriate words. However, I decided to dedicate a mechanical puzzle to him, which might never have been thought of without his 4L puzzle. TUTU is created by a transformation of the 4L puzzle into the usual n-folded cubic world. The transformation is written as: 4L is equal to 2 times 2L; which transforms into 2 times TU, which is in turn equal to TUTU. The cuboid box with an L-shaped opening becomes a 3x3x2 box with a T-shaped 3×3 opening. Is that all? Yes, that is all. Because something unexpected happens during this transformation, even for those familiar with 4L. While this remains perfectly valid, the 4L puzzle will always be the original. Many thanks for that, Hashimoto-san.”

Boron - Donald Osselaer by Eric Fuller

I received this awesome puzzle that was from the ‘Artisan Series’ which was an attempt by Eric to offer quality puzzles at a reasonable price distinguishing it from his regular offerings without a finish or signature.  Sadly this idea never took hold and was subsequently abandoned.

I must admit that I had to contact Tom at CubicDissection for the solution as I couldn’t get my head around assembling this puzzle as it arrived disassembled!

In 2014 Eric offered a larger craftsman version of this design and used a variety of woods, here’s his description from CubicDissection:

“From time to time I like to make a "display" puzzle. Usually it's a little larger in format, sturdy, and not so difficult that a non-puzzler won't have a good time playing around with it. When I saw Donald's new "Boron" design I knew it was a great candidate. With a reasonable 5.4 solution, Boron is not necessarily trivial but also not mind-bendingly difficult. The four inch size has a nice heft, weighing in at a full one lb. weight. This is a great gift for someone you want to encourage spatial abilities without them getting too frustrated.”

On-the-spot Insanity by Rik van Grol - 2003

I previously blogged about Rik’s foray into the ‘Insanity’ type puzzles and recently acquired this one that dates back to when I first started making puzzles in the early 2000’s.

This particular version has two solutions where no two symbols can be repeated on either side in a row or diagonal..not an easy task!

Rik was kind enough to include a ‘hint’ sheet..

Rik’s Egg Balance 2011 by Rik van Grol

I previously blogged about Rik’s Egg Balance from 2010.

As you can see Rik decided to revisit this design at IPP 31 with a small circular stand making this little bugger much more difficult to stand the egg on its end.

I’m fairly certain I also solved Rik’s by balancing it on a rough surface so the task remains..!