In each square there should be a dot on one side of the card and the other side is empty. When you've solved the wooden version it looks rather like a trivet - a teapot stand.Ĭut ten strips of cardboard from the pattern shown. The notches will probably have to be 0.5mm wider than the bar so they don't jam. Use a hacksaw to cut on either side of the notch and use a chisel to remove the excess wood. Cut 18mm square notches in the positions of the dots. Let's say the bar is 18mm square: in the diagram above, N = 6mm. Fine grain wood will be nicer than cheap pine. If you want to make a nice version to give to friends, search for "square wooden bar" or "square wooden strip" on eBay or visit your local timber merchant or DIY store. Perhaps you would like to write a computer program to find them all. There are 8 different solutions not counting rotations and reflections. It will probably take 15 minutes to find a solution the first time you do the puzzle. With practice, you should be able to find a new solution in a couple of minutes. The eight strips form the set of all the such different strips with the exception of the "all dots" and "all empty" strips. There must be a dot in each of the squares that is visible on the top surface. The are 4 strips running horizontally and 4 strips running vertically. The challenge is to weave the strips to make a four-by-four mat. Or you could make a small version to go in Christmas crackers. A convenient size is for each square to be 20mm across. No doubt you could use a 3D printer too but, personally, I really like wood.Ĭut eight strips of cardboard from the pattern shown. But you can make your own with a hacksaw, files, sandpaper and patience. I used to have access to a machine shop: a big milling machine makes lovely accurate wooden puzzles. When you're sure you have a good idea, you can make a nice version that other people can play with. Soma and pentominos are such popular puzzles because it's not trivially easy to find a solution but it doesn't take you hours or days. Once you've found such a set of pieces then will it fit into a simple shape? The Soma pieces fit into a 3x3x3 cube in 240 ways (excluding rotations and reflections) and the pentomino pieces will fit into a 6x10 rectangle in 2339 ways. The 12 pentomino pieces are "all the different shapes of 5 unit squares connected edge-to-edge". For instance the Soma cube is "all possible combinations of three or four unit cubes, joined at their faces, such that at least one inside corner is formed. What's satisfying is to find a set of pieces which follow a rule. You probably want the puzzle to take under an hour to solve. But you don't want the player to have to blindly search a huge "solution space" - there should be logical shortcuts you can discover. It shouldn't be obvious what the answer is. It's very hard to achieve a design like that. Is it a worthy puzzle? The ideal is a puzzle that is simple yet challenging. With any puzzle, you start by making simple version so you can test the idea. This Instructable is a description of some of the ones I designed many, many years ago when I was a student. The prettiest ones are wooden puzzles but I've got plenty of plastic or wire-and-string ones too. I been collecting mechanical "logic" puzzles since I was a child.
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