A little while ago Yukari sent out an email to the puzzling world offering
Juno's
latest creation, the
Con Way Puzzle, for sale. it was made from gorgeously grained wood so how could I turn it
down? Also it was a design by Juno so how could I turn it down? On top of that,
it came with a stand and I am a sucker for a puzzle with a stand for display so
how could I turn it down? Fear of the present wife could have made me turn it
down but I hit buy before I had time to think about what "she who must be
flinched from" even impinged on my mind! Only a few minutes later did I wonder
about the Whack! Ouch! that I might
receive....again!
This gloriously beautiful thing arrived within a week from all the way across
the globe and I lined up all the pieces for my photos. It was beautiful made
from New Guinea Walnut and American Cherry. I admired the grain and then
looked with horror at the shapes which appeared to be random and then the
frame which unexpectedly came in pieces. I have a long history with
Johan Heyns' puzzles having wonderful frames to display them on and me finding the
assembly of the frames being a huge first challenge! I managed the frame after
a few minutes of offing and blinding and had a look at what I had to play
with:
This puzzle is based on a design by the famous mathematician,
John Horton Conway who many of us have followed as teenagers interested in recreational
maths. I remember programming the Game of Life into my Sinclair ZX81 - sigh,
good times! The Conway puzzle was a classic packing puzzle that appeared in
Stewart Coffin's
Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections and has been made in some beautiful woods by various creators. It turns
out that the original version was not that tough once the puzzler made a
certain realisation. Juno had decided to take the initial idea and make it
better by making all the cuts skewed. He had been worried that the challenge
was too easy but when people tried out his 3D printed prototype they had
really enjoyed it. As a result I have another piece of glorious wood in my
collection.
I knew nothing about the original puzzle and set to afresh. There are 6 pieces
that seem to be based on a 2x2x1 basic shape and then 3 mini cubes that are
1x1x1 voxel in size apart from the fact that only one of the pieces has been
cut with orthogonal cuts. Everything was at an odd angle and looking at the
pieces, they were all slightly different meaning that finding a basic assembly
pattern wasn't going to do it. Juno showed off the solution to one of the
versions way down at the bottom of his product page but I was determined not
to look at it.
This is not one to solve on your lap (especially with cats around) - you need
a flat surface and I would suggest a ruler or tape measure as well. Knowing
that the cube is going to be 60mm in each direction was going to be very
helpful. The grain of the wood was not going to be helpful - Juno was careful
to ensure that you didn't solve it as a 3D jigsaw with the picture being the
grain. I found that the constructed frame was very useful to find corners that
were 90º in all dimensions. This helped narrow down what pieces could go
where. After finding a few corners (unfortunately several pieces had 2 corners
that could have been external and needed a trial and error approach with the
ruler. I had sort of decided on what I thought was the only possible basic
arrangement of the basic shapes but not workout which ones exactly went
where.
I did take it to work a couple of times but got no where with it apart from
to make a couple of arthropods laugh at my failure. Home it went for me to
have a proper effort on. My basic idea was right but I needed to find which
slanted cuts would match with each other - there were not going to be any
odd corners internally which definitely helped.
Finally after a couple of hours of thought and a bit of trial and error, I
had my Aha! moment and had a rather precariously assembled cube to pick up
and place on the display frame, hopefully without it falling apart. I have
put the photos behind a spoiler button so as not to inadvertently give any
clues but I suspect that the grain in my version will be very different to
yours and the pictures will to be helpful.
One Con Way Puzzle assembly
The single voxel cube is in the centre
I love a puzzle with a stand!
There are still 5 of these left in stock as I type. If assembling cubes is your thing then this will not disappoint you. It is a thing of beauty when on display, the frame is a puzzle in itself and this might be a really good puzzle to give to "normal people" to play with! it's very tactile and compelling to play with.
Thank you Juno and Yukari for yet another lovely fun challenge!
