Allard Bites Off More Than I Can Chew!

Allard's Exchange Puzzle - The B. Dorstrum Puzzle

At the last MPP just after shaking hands with all the guys who I have not seen for a while, Allard sidled up to me and magnanimously handed me a very nice presentation box. Inside was a beautifully displayed new old puzzle which he had given away to 70 or so other puzzlers in San Diego last month. I say that it is a "new old" puzzle because it actually dates back to 1908 and has been rediscovered by the highly talented Michel van Ipenburg who seems to be making a habit of resurrecting old designs. Michel had worked with the equally talented Robrecht Louage to bring the B. Dorstrum puzzle back to reality.

Rather than just pack it up in a little ziplock bag, Allard has made a really lovely presentation box complete with a sealed leaflet:

Top face

Back/Other face

Notice that on one side Allard has his inscription and on the other is the RL of Robrecht and MVI for Michel.

Yep! DON'T open the Patent application!

Having spent a few days side-tracked by Shane's latest toys, I had completely forgotten about Allard's treat. After I got stuck completely on Haleslock #5 (and I'm still stuck!) I decided to move on to the B Dorstrum puzzle.

It is beautifully manufactured from Trespa which appears to be a high-pressure laminate suitable for cladding buildings in as well as making surfaces of various kinds for interior use. Robrecht has used this stuff for years and years now and all his creations are fabulous to play with. It consists of a rectangular ring held captive by 3 layers of asterisks (* shapes) which, initially at least seem to rotate around a central pin. The aim is to remove the ring and (of course) then to put it back again. Again, my early idle viewing revealed the obvious notches cut into the arms of the asterisk and I thought that this would be a nice little maze puzzle. Lord! Was I wrong about that!

Within just a minute of actually playing with the puzzle, I had a realisation that the notches I could see did not lead anywhere and so...no maze! What the hell is this? I pushed and pulled at the ring and all of a sudden one of the layers moved and moved in a VERY unexpected way! And then both of the other layers moved in a similar fashion - OMG! This was completely unique and I suspected was not going to be easy! I set to last Monday evening and proceeded to explore where the movements went and what they allowed me to do. I very quickly moved to a position that I could not backtrack out of back to the start position - this is always a bad sign for me! Ten minutes after starting I had a huge Aha! moment:

Solved it! Hell NO! I am nowhere near solving it!

Yes, the ring was off and I felt sort of great. Only sort of? Yep! Only sort of! I could hear Allard and Michel whispering with glee in my ears:

"Now put it back...we dare you!"

These voices I keep hearing are becoming a cause for concern - it's bad enough hearing Mrs S chattering at me (Whack! Ouch!) but Allard and Michel too? Now I'm totally crackers!
With the ring removed, I was able to explore the movements of the plates a bit more and was able to reveal this - don't worry about seeing the photo below - it doesn't help you solve it and if you've played with the puzzle for more than a few seconds then you have discovered the nasty little secret:

There's a whole lotta movement possible!

Having listened to those nasty little voices - Whack! Ouch! Not you dear, I meant THEM, I set to the reassembly. Of course, I had absolutely no idea what I had done before and have spent most of the week alternating between this and the Haleslock #5. It is actually pretty easy to get the ring back on and interlocked at the correct place on the asterisks but something tells me that I have gone wrong somewhere:

Lord help me! I keep getting to this point but it's just not right - the central disk is offset.

Today after 6 days at it I cut the seal on the leaflet hoping for a little clue and was greeted by a copy of the original patent diagrams which were horrifically complex and impossible to understand - I'm impressed that Michel and Robrecht could interpret them. Inside that page was a big warning from Allard - a whole page showing this:

Very off-putting!

This put me off for another hour or so and then in abject failure, I opened the leaflet completely. My Jaw dropped! He's an absolute swine! Inside is the text of the patent which (at least to my feeble mind) is of no help whatsoever! My B. Dorstrum puzzle remains like this...probably forevermore!

Never to be solved?

I will keep at it...probably for years like many of my other toys! I know better than to ask Allard for help! In the meantime, I will carry on with the Haleslock #5 in the hope that it will not also be more than I can chew! Thanks, Allard, Michel.......and Shane! 😱😱😜

Cast Keyhole and Keeping my Mind Busy

Hanayama Cast Keyhole

Recently things up here have gotten very fraught for me - my Mum who you all know has been ill, had a crisis and went from ill to near terminal and I had to make a lot of calls and rush down to London. Luckily she is now being well cared for and seems comfortable. I thought for a while that she wouldn't last long but she's a tough old boot and is hanging in there just now. I've been a doctor for many years (25) and am surprised at my own response to it.

You would have thought that with all that going on, I wouldn't be writing a blog post or even playing with a puzzle at all but I certainly have found that in times like these I need something to occupy my mind to stop me dwelling on the terrible occurrences of last week (even medical professionals feel the stress when it is one of their own) - solving something fun and writing a blog post is a bit cathartic for me and very therapeutic. I definitely would not be up to doing a Revomaze but I find that a simple little puzzling diversion is just the ticket. I rummaged in my "to be solved" stash from Tomas at Sloyd and found the Hanayama Cast Keyhole. This puzzle is a beautiful little thing designed by the Finnish Vesa Timonen and is available at the bargain price of €14.95 from Sloyd. I guess that if you live in North America it might be cheaper to get it from Puzzle Master here for $12.95.

It arrived in the usual Hanayama immaculate black packaging and the instructions on the box say simply to take it apart and then put it back together again. The puzzle is 6.9 x 2.6 x 4.5 cm and made from lovely shiny gold and chrome metal. I took the photo before I had even played with it at all because these puzzles do get marked by fingerprints immediately and they do get scratched during play - the gold one in particular will look very scratched fairly quickly.

XS Headstress Lumberjack and a SPECIAL opportunity

XS Headstress Lumberjack

I ordered the XS Headstress Lumberjack puzzle from Puzzle Master's wood collection months and month ago and to my shame it has sat on my shelf completely untouched for far too long! I haven't bought many wooden puzzles from Puzzle Master because I have been very spoiled by all the amazing craftsmen out there who keep me supplied with wood. For example, you can see 4 of my latest additions - luckily acquired whilst the present Mrs S was away in Scotland visiting friends and family! This meant that when the postman delivered she was not there to see that I had been buying more stuff even after my IPP splurge!

It's not your pillow!

But it has not been all fun and frolicking whilst she has been away - I have had quite a lot of extra work to do as well as a few chores she has left for me and also had a night on call too. Somehow when she is away, with all the extra space in the bed (she sleeps starshaped!), the cats still cuddle up with me and I STILL get left with just a 6" strip of bed and a very poor night's sleep. In fact I regularly wake up to another head on my pillow! I have managed to tidy up the study which had looked like a bomb strike and hidden the new acquisitions so she by confronted by them as soon as she gets home!

The Lumberjack puzzle is really nicely made from Monkeypod wood by Family Games of America in their IQ range and their website states that the Lumberjack has been discontinued. So if you are interested in this puzzle, you should probably get it sooner rather than later. It is beautifully boxed and displayed and is a rather large puzzle measuring 12.1 cm in all directions. Like many mass produced puzzles it is not as well made as those by a craftsman but this is pretty cheap at $25 and I could not expect more. It has a nice finish to the wood and the cuts have been made very accurately. When assembled it is very stable and attractive.Puzzle Master have rated it as level 9 (Gruelling) on their scale of 5 - 10. When I first requested it, I had looked at it quickly and thought it was a variant of the Altekruse type puzzles and I was very interested in obtaining one. As yet I still do not have any Altekruse puzzles in my collection. On reading the instructions on the box I realised that it was not a modular type puzzle like the Altekruse but something else entirely. No solution is provided but if you need one then you can obtain it from here.

A Chance For You to Win and Perseverance Pays Off...

MiSenary Box from Michel van Ipenburg and Robrecht Louage
It's being auctioned for charity on Puzzle Paradise

OK! Normal service resumed! My first week back at work was fairly horrific! I had got quite used to getting up at 8am instead of just before 6 and definitely got used to having a very leisurely start to the day! After 7 weeks off for recuperation (including a week of annual leave) I got thrown in at the deep end and had to sink or swim with 3 of VERY big complex cases! Luckily, after 25 years as an anaesthetist I had not forgotten everything and the patient survival rate was 100%!! I, on the other hand, was absolutely shattered! I was so tired and haven't been able to solve anything all week! Thank goodness I have a few things saved up to write about.

I'm going to start off with a lovely little puzzle which I bought from my friend Michel van Ipenburg and which you now have the chance to win in a charity auction. I have communicated with him for several years now and know he is one of the foremost puzzlers in Europe with tremendous skills at both solving as well as design. I got to meet him for the first time in person at the IPP in Paris last year and enjoyed playing with his latest design in the design competition. The MiSenary box has a strange name which I did not fully understand at the time (partly because I did not realise it was Michel's entry). It is a box....yes I know! I don't collect boxes, but I DO collect N-ary puzzles and this is a Box AND N-ary. In fact, being 7-ary and made by Mi-chel, it is actually MiSenary. Get it? Yeah! It took me a while.

I first picked this up at one of the design competition tables and had absolutely no idea what was going on inside (the description did not hint at being N-ary). There are things sliding around inside as you rock it back and forth and sometimes it opens a bit and other times closes a bit. Occasionally it seems to close all the way and others it won't. I was totally confused and expressed this to Goetz, who was sitting next to me playing with something else. It was he who finally told me that it was N-ary and he finally had pity on me and said that someone had left it at a midway point of the solution. He gently took it from me and using what seemed to me to be a fantastically complex sequence of moves with multiple turns and twists, he reset it to the beginning and handed it back saying it was ready for me to solve. I am sure I must have looked rather foolish looking at him with my mouth agape but he was polite enough to not mention it. I played again for another 10 minutes or so before it was time for another event and needless to say, being not terribly bright, I got absolutely nowhere with it. I just had no inkling of what was happening inside.

Over the 3 days of the IPP I kept going back to it (it was usually partly solved when I picked it up) and at no point did I manage to understand it. Mental note to self.....buy one of these after IPP if Michel makes them available.

At the beginning of November Michel let me know that he had made a second batch of the box and offered me a chance to purchase one. Needless to say I practically bit his emailed hand off! The whole world knows that I am a sucker for N-ary puzzles and having struggled so much during IPP I could not possibly resist (Mrs S says I seem unable to resist any puzzles and she has a point!) Just before Xmas a nicely packaged copy arrived - mine is no 1 out of 10 from batch 2. It would appear that Ali had also got one and promptly opened his so I set straight to it. This time I spent time looking through the slot at the front at the grid and tried to imagine what it was. I slowly experimented and got things moving. An small inkling began and I made about 10 moves before having a minor panic attack and back-tracking and failing to manage it! Aaaargh! I was stuck part way into it. Yet again I had moved without really visualising what I was doing. Mrs S told me in no uncertain terms that I had to put it down because it was Xmas eve and I had to cook - it was cheese fondue (yummy!).

After dinner and having eaten more cheese in one sitting than I should have eaten in 2 or 3 months, I settled down with Mrs S in front of the TV and made more attempts at the MiSenary box. In my cheese induced hallucinating state, I suddenly had a vision of what might be inside the box and what was happening as I made various moves. With lots of annoying muttering and counting to upset Mrs S I finally managed to open it. Very clever idea and beautifully made.

Solved! Michel and Robrecht say "Well done!"

This puzzle is a delight and you now have a chance to get hold of a copy for your own collection. The very last one in batch 2 and the last one that will ever be made has been put up for auction on Puzzle Paradise. It is 125x50x60mm in size made from Tropical hardwood, Trespa and Steel - Michel says that the copy for auction is the best looking of them all. If the price goes particularly high then Michel has said that he may add a bonus prize for the winner. The important thing is that the auction is for charity - the beneficiary will be The Antoni van Leeuwenhoek foundation / Netherlands Cancer Institute. This is a very worthy charity so please bid high and often.

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Keep on trying.....

Back in March last year I showed off a nice big batch of puzzles designed and made by my friend Aaron Wang. I managed to solve a few over the subsequent weeks and one of those (Santa's socks) even became one of my top puzzles of 2017. The Clover was Aaron's entry into the design competition and was one of the most complex puzzles to solve from that batch but still possible for me within a reasonable amount of time. There were, however, 3 puzzles in the group that I struggled with....for months and months and months! I really don't know why they took me so long but I just could not seem to get my head round them at all.

Balance

Between Christmas and New Year's eve I got the 3 remaining puzzles out again - Mrs S was feeling mellow after Xmas and I decided to risk jingling a bit in the hope that firstly I might have a moment of genius (or more likely, luck) and secondly that I might get away without a Whack! Ouch! I was lucky on both counts. The aim of the Balance (and the theme of this bunch) is that the balls must end up grouped together on one side of the puzzle. The idea should have been very similar to the Wedding Vows puzzle from PuzzleMaster that I reviewed way back in May 2015. The Wedding vows looks impossible but with a bit of fiddling with the loop in the middle it quickly becomes clear what to do. I was certain that the Balance was a variant of this but for some reason I just could not see the trick to it. I went back to it on and off for 9 months without finding that breakthrough Aha! moment. I spent a whole evening fiddling with this and developing a knot in the centre of the puzzle around that pesky ring. After a couple of hours of back and forth I noticed something familiar. I must have been at exactly that position many many times over the 9 months and just not recognised what was going on. Having noticed that familiarity I knew what to do and a few minutes later I had this:

OMG! It took 9 months!

Balance IS very similar to the Wedding Vows puzzle but has just enough difference to it that it confused me a lot and took me such a long time. I am sure that most of you would be able to solve it within an hour but I, being not terribly bright, took a while! This one is not currently for sale as yet but a decent collection of Aaron's puzzles (he is also known as Wang Yulong) are available from the Felix puzzle company.

Elephant

The Elephant was immediately attempted after my success with Balance and again it kicked my butt! Just like Balance and Wedding Vows, the aim is to arrange the rings next to each other on one side of the puzzle. I thought that the same things I had done with balance would help me with Elephant and I set to. Oh boy! I was seriously wrong! I'm sure that you geniuses out there can see straight away that this one does not share much in common with Balance. The central loop is trapped but doesn't form the same string configuration as the previous 2 and again I got stuck! There was a fair bit of effing and blinding before Mrs S gave me "the look" and I put it down again.

Over the next few days I tried again and again to understand this damned puzzle. In the end I gave up on my thinking that it shared anything in common with the Balance and had a good look at it. Unfortunately looking doesn't help! It took me several hours before my Aha! moment occurred and it was fantastic!

At last!

It has a totally different solution path to Balance and is really clever! Unfortunately I am not really clever.... I couldn't reset the puzzle to the beginning. Luckily Aaron has started using these nice little catches on his puzzles to allow quick reset (especially if you have a big knot). I cheated with the catch and started again...it took me another 24 hours and I finally properly understood the puzzle. This puzzle forced me to think© and it hurt! Absolutely brilliant and finally time to crack the last remaining puzzle, Pinocchio.

Pinocchio

This puzzle again is similar in basic shape and premise to the antecedent but, with the extra ring and the loop in a different place, it was a significantly tougher challenge. Just like before I was filled with hope at my success at the Elephant and I immediately tried the same type of moves...I got a knot! Quite a big knot! Thank heavens for the catch again. Clearly this puzzle is totally different and I should have realised that Aaron would not release 2 puzzles with identical solutions at the same time!

I played with this one for a couple of weeks again and failed repeatedly. One morning in despair, I actually emailed Aaron to ask for just a small clue. Yes it was that bad! That very evening I had not had a reply and I sat down again with the puzzle and had a proper think. Something began to filter into my dense skull and I had an idea, tried it and failed but noticed something else. I tried something counterintuitive and AHA!!!!

My goodness! That was difficult!

The general technique is similar to the Elephant puzzle but the new morphology changes the exact sequence of moves. Half of it is quite simple and then it requires some fairly complex reorganisation of the string before the next critical move is possible! I was able to email Aaron back and tell him that no help was needed even before he had responded - Phew! That is one VERY clever puzzle.

All of these share a basic idea but have radically different solutions - they all need one to Think© which is something I am not good at.

Thank you Aaron, I cannot wait for some new ones from you!

Don't forget the auction on Puzzle Paradise everyone - bid high and often for charity!

A Cheat! I'm Sorry!

Axis from Rademic Puzzles

This will be an attempt at a quickie - I know I don't really do short reviews due to my verbal diarrhoea but I seldom get complaints. I'm on call today and hoping not to be called in (sleep deprivation is hard at my age!!) so whilst I have a few moments I'm going to attempt a blog post.

700,000!!!

After my triumphant announcement yesterday, I have to admit to something awful.... I have been a cheat and hope you can forgive me. A few months ago I acquired a couple of absolutely beautifully made Hedgehog in cage puzzles from Rademic Puzzles in the Czech Republic and absolutely loved the look and quality of them. Oli had raved about them on Facebook and Allard reviewed a few here. I solved the Gen version quite quickly and enjoyed the process very much and wrote my thoughts here.

The puzzle is 50 x 75 mm in size and weighs 340g. The cage is beautiful having been made from brushed stainless steel and it certainly feels a solid puzzle - drop it on a kitchen tile and you're in trouble with the wife. The hedgehog itself is 6 spined and stunningly made from a vibrant red anodised aluminium with the spines being varying lengths but each is at 90º to the others. It is really beautiful and a great price at 599 Czech Koruna (approx £18.50 or $24.50)

He Risks A Whack! Ouch!

But He "Creeps" Past It! Phew!

This required wine...LOTS of wine

When Mine offers puzzles, most of us say yes and we wait for a bit for hime to manufacture said puzzles and postage occurs when you least expect it. My package went into my tracking app and for some reason went from Japan to China and then on to India. I have no idea why - my knowledge of shipping lanes and flight paths is sketchy to say the least but even I know that is an odd path to take to the UK. The tracking stopped in India for a week or so and I resigned myself to waiting for a long time. The app and the Yamato website had no further updates. In the meantime...

Tye Stahly also manufactures some new toys and puts them up for sale. The UK puzzlers have a good thing going as he combines them all together into what I imagine is a shipping container which heads towards Allard's house and very forgiving wife (Gill is an angel!) I knew the shipping container had set off but I didn't know more. It must have been a very fast ship or maybe even one of those airyplane things because after just a few days from going on sale to somehow being forwarded on by the PuzzleMan himself to arriving at PuzzleMad HQ was incredibly fast. 

Both boxes arrived on the same day and due to work commitments, I didn't get to open them straight away. I have worked yet another 6 day week and "she who must be feared" got fed up having two medium sized boxes sitting in the porch cluttering up the place. She obviously hadn't thought it through properly because boxes in the porch don't really count as clutter. It's only when you open said boxes to find a total of 16 new puzzling toys on the kitchen work surface that you realise what clutter is! Whack! Ouch!

Yes, she actually opened the boxes for me and laid out the pile o' puzzles on the kitchen granite for me. When I got home from work on Saturday, she stood there glaring at me and menacingly tapped her foot whilst I made excuses. In the end I couldn't really think of any decent excuses and offered her wine to make up for it. This mollified her a little bit so I tried more wine but it didn't help much and I suspect I'm going to suffer in the near future. To try and improve the situation, I have taken my photos and have endeavoured to stash them somewhere not cluttered until I have had a chance to play. Phew! I might have got away with it. Whack! Ouch! Maybe not...

The first one I have tried was one by the amazing Yuu Asaka. I couldn't resist the Creep 2 puzzle which looked so different from his usual packing puzzles:

Creep 2 pieces

The stated aim on the box (the puzzles from Yuu-san are always beautifully presented) is to insert the two sliders completely inside the tray.

It is only a level 2 out of 5 and the expected puzzling time should be about 20 minutes according to the designer. Well we will see about that! I am famous/infamous for taking days or weeks instead of minutes.

This puzzle reminded me very much of a wonderful puzzle by Robrecht Louage, the Cerradura Doble.

Off we go...

The gaps in the frame at each edge are different sizes which should give a clue to which pieces go where and indeed, I was able to quite quickly determine then final position of the two sliders. There's nothing else to do other than to slide them each inside in turn and look at how they will interact as you move the pieces back and forth. At this point, I realised that Yuu-san is what is known in the trade as a "sneaky bugger"! I spent the full amount of time (20 minutes) trying the same thing over and over again but it just wouldn't work. Did I have the wrong pieces? I actually checked the pieces against on-line photos and there was no mistake - silly me ( or...I'm an eejit).

Time to think© and it hurt a bit. Eventually, I had an aha! moment when I realised my initial supposition had been incorrect. Once I had made my discovery, I had my solved puzzle and it's really quite satisfying. The whole puzzle seems to be about misdirection. The design makes you think the wrong thing and if you are anything like me, you will be stuck on that wrong thought for a while before eventually forcing yourself to look further. It is really very clever and almost perfect for newbies or visitors to the house who you would like to bamboozle. I think I will take it to work to torture people for a while. Hopefully Mrs S will not murder me when she sobers up/regains consciousness from the barrel of wine I have had to ply her with!

If you are wanting to buy a copy then PuzzleMaster has it for sale here and you could even buy the rest of Yuu-san's puzzles at the same time. In the UK you could try JPGames or Crux puzzles.

Just Meandering About

Meanders Box

Yukari sends out an email to subscribers of the Pluredro blog when new stuff has been made. As well as puzzle stuff she includes her random thoughts on the blog just to hone her English language skills (which are pretty good by the way). At the beginning of August, I learned about the release of 2 versions of the Meanders box - a lovely design with 4 different setups to allow 4 different solutions. There was one version (348 moves) which Juno and Yukari both considered too difficult/arduous to be any puzzler's primary choice and another (172 moves) which they thought would be perfect for almost everyone. I had recently spent my pocket money and decided to wait a while before placing an order and promptly forgot about it. Puzzlers, of course, are a contrary bunch and they immediately homed in on the most difficult one and the puzzle stock promptly began to fall. Luckily for me, I chat with Matt Dawson fairly frequently and he noticed that when he bought his copy they were down to just one left. He notified me and I immediately (within a few minutes) jumped on the last one...PHEW!

This gorgeous puzzle arrived a couple of weeks later from Oz and I have been working on it intermittently since it arrived. Yes, yes! I know it's labelled as a box but it really isn't a box! Firstly there was no bread in it and bread could not possibly fit inside! If this comment mystifies you then read my review of the Heart case from Juno here. I will buy some puzzles that have cavities if there is something else special about them - this puzzle is partially N-ary and partially maze puzzle so perfectly allowable for my collection.

Its' dimensions are 95 x 85 x 84mm and it is made from Burmese Teak, Rose Alder, Silver Ash (citrus family tree) and some metal pieces inside. Juno seems to be developing a certain look - his recent puzzles are instantly recognizable as his workmanship and that is no bad thing.

The aim is (as you would expect) to open the box by following the maze...except the maze that you can see is not the maze you are following. The real maze and pins inside it are inside and invisible so it needs to be done by deduction and feel. This sounds really simple (the mazes are not as complex as a Revomaze) but the difficulty comes from the fact that the movement of the pins needs to be made stepwise due to the plates having small steps cut out of the ends where they interact with each other. The effect of this is that I found I lost track of which direction I was travelling in and also missed a number of choices of direction to travel. The first time I attempted it I got to here and thought I had solved it:

Cavity visible - is it solved? Nope!

Reading on the product page I saw that the aim is to completely remove the maze lid from the box. and I was stuck. Several times I reached this position and tried to continue along the path only to find myself back at the beginning. Finally, after several hours (Yukari wasn't joking when she said that the high-level one was arduous), I found a hidden passage and took that. Finally, I managed to remove the lid:

Solved the first challenge!

To prove that I really understood it, I then reassembled it back to the beginning which strangely was much easier. I tried opening it again and struggled yet again but not quite so much as the first time. I was not able to count the number of moves but I suspect that the puzzle arrived in the easiest set-up with 260 moves. Time to try another one - each maze can be placed in the puzzle in 2 orientations giving a total of 4 challenges (260, 263, 337 and 348 steps to fully open the puzzle box). The only difference with the "simpler" puzzle is that the steps are bigger and there are less of them per side giving a solution level choice of 130, 134, 161 and 172 steps to fully open the puzzle.

I personally preferred to solve this as an "opening" puzzle and therefore chose to use Juno's beautifully implemented reset mechanism - there are screws underneath:

Such a simple reset mechanism
Here you can see the steps on the side faces.

Unscrewing those screws allows you to left the top frame away and place all the pieces back in the closed position and with the maze in whichever orientation you choose:

The quick reset method revealed - clever idea.
Pick the assembly you prefer.

Here are the 2 mazes for you to examine - believe me when I say that having seen them, you are no closer to solving the puzzle - this one has to be solved by feel rather than by sight. Derek has provided me with a Burrtools file for the puzzle but I have refrained from using it so far.

2 mazes each of which can be oriented in 2 ways in the puzzle

So far I have done 2 of the solutions and have still to do the remaining 2. It is quite arduous and I now agree with Yukari and Juno - this puzzle is still perfectly fun with the lower level construction - luckily for you, there are still plenty of these available on their store. It will look fabulous on display with my other Yananose puzzles. I am eagerly awaiting more toys from Oz! Thank you, Juno and Yukari.

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Follow up with the Hales puzzles

Silver lock exchange puzzle is open!

Shane's recent puzzles have been kicking my butt! All excited at my success with the Hokey Cokey lock last week (they are still available for sale on Paradise if you are interested), I set to on Shane's locks and after a week of working on them on and off, I have managed to solve just the Silver lock exchange puzzle. The Goldilock and the amazing Haleslock 5 are as they were when I bought them. The Goldilock has one obvious first step and I am stuck, the Haleslock 5 doesn't even have that! I have a key which won't go in the keyway and a lock which rattles a lot more than one would expect for such a solid lock - something tells me it has been "doctored"!

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How could I forget Allard?

Allard's exchange puzzle - the B Dorstrum Puzzle

Last week, when I wrote my blog after the MPP, I had not had time to unpack my box of goodies that I took with me and which also contained this lovely and historical challenge given by Allard. My friend Michel van Ipenburg seems to have a knack of finding the patents and descriptions of fabulous historic puzzles and then reconstructing them with the help of Robrecht Louage. The B Dorstrum puzzle is the latest of these. I have been fiddling with this for a day or so now and made some interesting discoveries but not got very far yet - it is telling that the genius that is Goetz Schwandtner has also not got very far either!

I will keep you informed when and more likely, if, I get anywhere with it. Thanks, Allard!