October 9, 2018
Description
This is a burr puzzle, which is a puzzle made of pieces with different notches, that interlocks with each other, where the goal is to disassemble all the pieces.
These puzzles have been usually made by hand out of wood, what cause them to be quite pricey, but now, with 3D printers, we have the chance to get them at a much lower price (of course, due to tolerances, handmade wood ones might have better quality).
The so called "level of the puzzle", refers to the minimum number of movements that you have to make in order to get the first piece out. Although this gives an approximate idea on the puzzle difficulty, some puzzles would have more complex combinations of movements, or more complicated movements to spot.
In this case, I modeled in CAD the puzzle RailBox, by Yavuz Demirhan. This is an 18-level puzzle, easy enough for a first attempt on a burr puzzle, but still challenging to have some fun for a while.
You can watch how this puzzle works in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiKhM7Q2Yqw
The pieces have a 0.1mm tolerance on each face, and the cage has a 0.15mm tolerance. Your printer should be decently well calibrated in order for the pieces to fix correctly.
The small tolerances are given because if the pieces where loose, they could move unintentionally, and reveal the solution by accident.
Printed at 0.2mm, lowering a little the default speed parameters to avoid any ghosting.
The cage was printed with support material, and the rough surface in contact with the supports needed a little bit of sanding.
In orther to assemble the puzzle, there is a program called Burr Tools, that gives you all the possible combinations of the pieces, the number of moves that requires, and drives you step by step through the assemble/disassemble process. This tool takes .xmpuzzle files (file included).
Here is a link to the download page: http://burrtools.sourceforge.net/
And here is a small tutorial in which I explain how to view the solution of the puzzle with this program: https://youtu.be/pQ6K7uJKFMw
It is highly recommended to ask another person to assemble the puzzle, so that you don´t get any clue on how to solve it afterwards.
Regarding the use of the program to get the solution of the puzzle:
"Solutions are like narcotics, you are encouraged to stay away"
The design of this puzzle was obtained in puzzlewillbeplayed.com
Most of the content on this website, is protected by copyright. This means that you can use it for private use, but you cannot get any profit out of its sale.
License:
Creative Commons - Attribution - Share Alike
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