Weaving For Years!

Weaving from Aaron Wang

A very short post today - I have been working yet again this weekend and had very little time for puzzling and no Morbidity and Mortality meetings to ignore whilst playing with my toys! 🤣

Every year Aaron Wang produces a whole bunch of new disentanglement puzzles for sale from various genius designers. He sends out an email with his upcoming catalogue additions to his adoring customers and also posts the list on Facebook for people to choose from. This year he has a huge batch and I have already made my selection (don't tell Mrs S!) He only really produces puzzles of level 9 and higher and most are 10 or 10+ which means terrifyingly difficult. I have collected dozens (if not hundreds) of his creations over the years and there are 3 very large boxes of them in my garage with the ones that I have solved and 2 boxes in a wardrobe in the house of those I have so far failed to solve. Many of his puzzles involve string which means huge complexity and the ability to create tangled knotted catastrophes. More recently he has been using a lobster claw to allow emergency release of the catastrophe but there are a good few that don't have it and these frighten me to death! One of these is the Weaving puzzle signed by the incredible DDK and made in very very limited numbers by Aaron. In fact, as far as I know there may be only 2 or 3 copies in existence. I received one as a gift within my 2022 purchase.

Why did he not mass produce it? Some of the puzzles are so horrendous to make that he only makes a very small batch. That wasn't the reason this time. Aaron only made a few because he felt it was too simple a puzzle to put out on sale. OMG!

I have had this in one of my trays of puzzles to be solved for nearly 3 years and have picked it up many many times since I got it and have singularly failed and scared myself to death on a number of occasions. It consists of a single loop of string (not very long) and a ball to prevent the loop just being fed through all the oval metal rings. It is woven through a complex metal grill that looks rather like a radiator. The short length of the string should be reassuring BUT the lack of a lobster claw release mechanism is scary. I was also rather bamboozled by the way the string is woven through the centre of the grill completely but the outer wires were split on either side. On multiple occasions I tried various approaches to the disentanglement and began to get caught up in a knot or found myself running out of length. Despite the claimed "excessive simplicity" of the puzzle, I managed to completely fail for a very long time. I refused to put it away in my wardrobe and give up - if Aaron said it was easy, then there must be something to it that I should be able to find. I persevered...

During the meeting last week, having solved the packing puzzles first and feeling that I was on a roll, I picked up the Weaving puzzle yet again. As usual, I had no recollection of anything I had tried before and just started afresh. What if I do this??? Oooh! that's interesting. Suddenly, I was weaving away and not creating a knot. After 16 moves I had a rather nice interesting configuration and then another 18 moves I suddenly had 2 pieces of puzzle and a mystifies expression on my face. Why had it taken nearly 3 years? Aaron was right, it was a lot simpler than his usual level but, I have to say, no less delightful for that. 

Finally!
Now I need to put it back together again

Returning it to the start position did cause a little difficulty as I could not recall what I had done at the midpoint of the solve but I did manage it after an extra ½ hour of swearing under my breath! Yay! I can finally put another puzzle away in the wire puzzle collection box in the garage.

Thank you Aaron for yet another fabulous challenge - I am looking forward to my selection of puzzles from the new set. I am sure that I am not the only one but I think it would be good if you would consider making a few slightly simpler puzzles for sale. Not all of us are the disentanglement genius that you and your designing geniuses are.

---

Bucolic Cube

About 6 months ago I received some correspondence from a puzzler who suggested that I might want to have a look at the Bucolic cube. It was designed by Yasuhiro Hashimoto and entered into the 2013 IPP design competition in Narita, Japan where it won a "Top ten vote getters award". I had taken a note of this one to be either purchased or made in the future and this week managed to have a play.

What stimulated me to try it now when I had so little time to play? Well, Mrs S has decided that painting and decorating needs to be done in the house as it has been quite a long time since it was last done. Luckily for me, she does not want me to do the painting and decorating - she has another man who comes in to do it. My job is to go out and work my arse off to pay for the other man's services. During the process of clearing a couple of the rooms, I was handed my compartmented box with my fight cubes in them and was told that the box needed to be put away somewhere not cluttering the house. I had completely forgotten that I had them and this jogged my memory to go back and create the Bucolic cube and see what all the fuss was about.

The puzzle consists of 3 identical shapes to be assembled into a 3x3x3 shape - there will be 6 holes in the structure which should make it simpler but actually made it harder for me because I was not creating a complete face and they did not properly interlock. This meant that there were a lot more possible orientations of the pieces alongside each other. After a whole evening of playing with it, I came to the same conclusion as my corespondent and the IPP members that this puzzle was a good one - a very VERY good one.

It took me a good few hours!

If you don't have the Fight cubes then this should be easy to 3D print or you could buy it from PuzzleMaster here or from PuzzleGuy here. This is well worth getting your hands on - it is significantly more challenging than it looks.