Where Should I Display This?

Warty Burr from Ars Ænigmæ

A new logo

As you can tell, I am working my way through my IPP purchase backlog. This Just like last week's puzzle this has been sitting on my shelf in a pile with all the others I have yet to complete. The whole puzzle world was shocked and devastated at the unexpected sudden death of our friend Eric Fuller. His humour, craftsmanship and ability to spot a great challenge made him a fabulous puzzling friend. Over many years (over a decade) he worked with and trained up a whole bunch of craftsmen. We were all very pleased to see that Steve, Tom and Jeff worked something out with Eric's estate to allow them to take over the business. They were quiet for a very very long time but we all got hints every now and then that things were in the works. We finally got a release from them using their rebranded store, Ars Ænigmæ (Damn, that's awkward to type!). When they had their first releases, I had had some rather large expenses and couldn't really spare the cash to buy from them. After that, time just flew by. I had been very pleased to meet Tom at the IPP towards the end of the day of the party. There was a lot of stuff to buy but I had spent so so much already 😱. However, I could not leave him without adding a new Cubic/Ars puzzle to my collection. I picked the Warty burr by Tyler Hudson because it was affordable (although most of what they have on their website is nicely priced) and also compact enough to fit into a rather over-stuffed bag.

I chose the version made from Jatoba and Wenge. The wood is stunning and the finish is very much up to Eric's exacting standards. It was given to me in a shrink wrapped package with the puzzle in the disassembled state. It's clearly a 6 piece burr but there's an extra piece - a rather large attractive extra piece, making it a 7 piece burr. That's odd and looking at the standard burr pieces, there is no way that the extra piece can just fit inside. Hence the name - it fits inside and also protrudes outside like a wart on the side.

Is that enough burr sets? I hate to think how many challenges there are in there!

Over the years I have realised (and told all of you many times) that I am absolutely terrible at assembly puzzles! I have quite a lot of burr sets now and really struggle to assemble the challenges from scratch. I have tried so many times but still fail almost every time. Of course the Warty burr is another 6 piece burr but extra. I didn't think that I would stand a chance. Despite that, I was determined to give it a jolly good try. 

First thing was going to be to work out where the wart went and then how the other pieces could be assembled around and adjacent to it. I was gratified to see that I could work out how the wart interacted and found that there were 3 burr sticks that HAD to wrap around it and then was really pleased to see that they could only fit in one way. Time to look at the rest. The remaining 3 burr sticks had to go together in one way with one stick being reversible. That might cause problems later. Then I noticed that the second 3 piece assembly could fit in any of three orientations.

I actually made progress with it quite quickly

At this point I discovered my limitations. I wanted to assemble those two sets of 3 pieces either as two units or as individual sticks. I had so many promising approaches but for the life of me I could not find a sequence that was could be assembled. Over a few days I had to put it down and think© and return to it. My fundamental idea was flawed - the two sub-assemblies were correct in the way it was organised but the actual assembly was much more complex than my original thought. It is only a level 4 puzzle according to Burrtools (of course I made a file after I had finished) but the required sequence is completely unexpected. 

  

Yay! I have assembled something for once!

After 3 days of attempts, I had my 7 piece burr with a wart on the side. It is very beautiful.

The puzzle is very much up to Eric's exacting standards and now I have to decide: do I display it amongst my Cubic dissections collection or make a new section just for Ars Ænigmæ? At the moment, at least until I get more puzzles from them, I think I will store it alongside Eric's legacy - thanks guys.