OMG! What Have I Done?

Brass side

Steel side with monkey

I'm an eejit! I've said it many times here and a certain woman within arms length of me tells me it at regular intervals! Why this time? I have just noticed that after my week off, I had put myself down to work 5 weekends in a row! 😱 As a consequence I have been desperately trying to solve something for today and am struggling.

I failed yet again to unpack the OPUP (have I been given the one that doesn't unpack??? and then also been trying to slide the Dovetail bar 2 apart and over a whole week of effort at work I have managed absolutely nothing. 

I then decided to try the Blind Panic puzzle from Ali (it was his exchange puzzle at the IPP). What is it I hear you ask? These voices in my head are getting quite troublesome! You can depend on the Two Brass Monkeys to create something very special - it's a Panex in 3D cylindrical form with a hidden reserve column. It "only" has 10 pieces to swap over so should be "easy"? Oh hell no! I had been at it for days and realised that I needed to do it in tandem with a version that I could see everything. The Bell was a Siebenstein puzzle that I bought from Hendrik many years ago when I found that the original Panex puzzles always sold for an exorbitant sum. I had thought it was an N-ary puzzle on playing with it, I realised that there was far more to it than that. I never solved it!

The Bell - also a Panex puzzle

For some stupid reason, I had forgotten that and set to work on Ali's version which was only level 5. The aim was to move the 5 brass pieces to the column above the monkey (hence achieving a figurative brass monkey and the steel pieces to the other column. I have been working on them level by level for a week.

It has unfortunately gotten too late for me to write much more but I think I have a process worked out. Sigh! I need more time.