Motivation From The Cutlery Drawer

Oskar's Nested Burr

Two pieces removed and I shy away

I received this 3D printed puzzle back in December last year. I didn't order it because I actually had never heard of it. I know that it was made by Mike Rollberg but I am not sure how it came to be in my possession. It must have been a gift from someone and I'm very sorry that I cannot remember who sent it to me. It must have  included it in another delivery. To whoever you are, thank you very much - I hadn't realised up until this week how good a puzzle it actually was. Thank you Mike for printing this and getting it to me. Of course, being a puzzle design by Oskar van Deventer, I should have realised it was going to be fabulous! It's an 18 piece burr but completely different to the usual design and much more interesting than most 18 piece burrs.

I left this in our correspondence tray that sits in our kitchen for a few days after it arrived and picked it up intermittently and took a couple of pieces out, realised what was going to happen if I progressed further and stopped there quickly. I put it back in the tray and weirdly it attracted the cats. There is something about the texture of 3D printed puzzles that they seem to love - I heard a funny noise behind me one evening and saw a cat at the puzzle, shooed her off and picked it up to check for bite marks. No damage but it was covered in cat saliva! YUCK! I dried it off and moved it to the cutlery drawer where it sat on top of the small knives for quite a long time. 

I picked it up periodically because I kept being reminded it was there every time I set the table for a meal. At some point I think I even removed the first 6 pieces and hurriedly put them back. It gets even more frightening as you take out more pieces because stuff does get a bit loose. Having said this, as long as you hold it properly it doesn't fall apart.

Eventually Mrs S started to get a bit annoyed having a puzzle permanently in the cutlery drawer. She understands the cat slobber situation but doesn't want puzzles in the house kitchen any longer than they have to be there. A week or so ago, I got shouted at (again) and the puzzle was forcibly removed from the cutlery drawer and I was told that if it was seen again then I might need a surgical removal of puzzle from an orifice that is not intended for that direction of travel. 

Motivation had finally arrived and yesterday I progressed through a sequence of piece removal to get myself a nice pile o'pieces:

Now that looks intimidating

Still intimidating!

What about the reassembly? Interestingly, the disassembly has a coloured rhythm to it and as long as you remember that rhythm then you have a big help with the reassembly of the burr. A bit of experimentation is required to work out the orientation of the pieces but it's usually fairly easy to work out when one is pointing the wrong way or needs rotating 90º along its axis.

After about a half hour of play, I had put it back together - it's really very clever and delightfully tactile to play with. If you get a chance to play with one of these then jump at it (you can download the files to print it yourself from Oskar's file repository). It's really rather clever!