Can You Prove That You Are A Primate?

Ant Hunt by Boaz Feldman comes with a "primat"ive narrative

Having bought and even solved a whole bunch of the Feldman family creations over the years, starting with the incredible DanLock from Dan Feldman way back in 2011 (currently only available from PuzzleMaster) and moving through a whole bunch of increasingly amazing creations from Boaz, I couldn't resist the latest one, Ant Hunt (which is on sale just now direct from Boaz or available from PuzzleMaster here).

It arrived at PuzzleMad HQ back at the beginning of November last year and I was pleased to see that the instructions were simple:

"Open the lock and find the ant!"

As usual there is the admonishment not to use excessive force or use and external tools. Oddly, the back of the instruction card mentioned using tools to go bug hunting and how chimps did it. This had to be a big clue and I had to prove that I was at least as good as a chimp! Having said that, if I was a chimp relying on my abilities here to feed myself, I would have starved to death a long time ago!

Beautifully presented!

All of these locks are beautifully presented in a bag with the card. I dutifully now check the bag very carefully for hidden tools having been caught out for a long time with a previous puzzle. This puzzle accompanied me to work for several months with me getting absolutely nowhere before I transferred it to my pile of puzzles to solve at home. Oddly, the velour bag kept turning itself inside out every time I went to pick it up. I would return it to the correct orientation each time only to find it inside out again within a few days. This was very confusing to the male primate of the house (I actually began to question my sanity yet again) until one day I caught the female chimp in the HQ turning the bag inside out. I found out that Mrs S couldn't stand the fact that the bag picks up fluff and stour from my work bag which offends her deeply! Once I had taken a lint cleaner to it, she allowed it to stay the correct way around! Phew! I'm not bonkers!

I have sort of been on a lock roll recently - I managed to solve the Who Dares Wins and the MWPuzzles Keyring within a week or so and thinking this might bode well for other similar types of puzzles, I went back to Ant Hunt again and tried to utilise a little Think©ing. That will be an Ouch! without the Whack!

The keyring comes apart in the usual fashion and the key goes in the keyway in the usual way. It even turns 90º giving a very false hope. The key turns and the lock fails to open! Yes, what did any of you expect? Time for a closer look...there is hole in the front of the lock which you can see right through  and also a hole in each side which don't seem to show anything significant. if you feel the urge to emulate the picture at the top of the blog post you can poke your undone keyring into any of those holes and achieve pretty much nothing:

Look at me! I'm a chimp!
If you do this on the front it will go right through

None of this poking is terribly helpful and so it's time to look elsewhere. Interestingly, the shackle of the lock has quite a lot of play in it with movement of about 6-8mm. Except sometimes there is minimal movement possible (only a couple of mm) and oddly this minimal movement can occur at an extended position or a retracted position. It doesn't take long to work out what is going on to be able to make the shackle abilities change to whichever state you want it to be in - apart from open! This was where I was stuck for several months.

I played with this state of affairs for a while before I discovered something else that I should have found a long time before - Boaz had used a fairly standard trick but because I had been kept occupied by holes and a moving shackle, I had not looked further. Having made this important discovery, I now had more "primat"ive things to try and a new ability was found. Even with this nice new ability, I was unable to go any further until I thought© to combine one or two abilities into a chain (this really marks me as one of the higher primates or maybe a crow) and suddenly I had found the resident ant in the puzzle. Incredibly well hidden and not going to be found by accident without doing the right sequence of moves. After that, opening the lock was a lovely next step and the reason it all worked was revealed with a gasp of delight:

Incredible puzzle manufacturing skills

Resetting the lock is a relatively easy sequence as long as you know what you had done to get it open and doing it again is a pleasant bit of fun. I will be showing this off to my long-suffering anaesthesia assistants to show the engineering possibilities of a lock.

This is an amazing feat of puzzle engineering using a standard Nabob padlock. Yet again, I'm blown away by what is possible. Basically, I will have to buy everything that Boaz makes - I am not very good at lock puzzles (or any puzzles for that matter!) and they do keep me occupied for a very long time which proves very good value and ends with a phenomenal (slightly desperate) Aha! moment. You should get one whilst you can (either from Boaz direct or from PuzzleMaster) - you won't be disappointed.