It’s a Feature – Inaccurate Burr

What happens after you’ve completed 336 burr puzzle pieces only to realize that you’ve completely flubbed the measurements for the cuts – You call it a feature and charge extra!

Pure marketing genius!  And Eric Fuller is that marketing genius behind Cubicdissection’s branding drive.  Pavlov would be proud to see the puzzling masses salivating over the sight of cardboard boxes secured with orange tape.

When Inaccurate Burr was released in 2016, acquiring a copy was a no-brainer.  What’s not to like?  Designed by Junichi Yananose, make by Eric Fuller at Cubicdissection, and Oh, that beautiful Marblewood!

As per my wont, I quickly disassembled the burr without paying too much attention so that I could attack it as an assembly process.  Only when I had it apart did I realize that I was a tad impetuous and should have looked at it first to see why it was called Inaccurate Burr.  I’d like to be able to say that this is a rare occurrence, but it seems to occur often.  My favorite is pulling out pieces of a puzzle that I had disassembled years ago with no idea what puzzle it is or what shape it’s supposed to make.  And of course, the ultimate experience is when you acquire pieces of a puzzle with unknown origins.  Some puzzlers even have their friends disassemble multiple puzzles and mix the pieces to provide the penultimate solving experience transcending the normal single puzzle experience, which as you already know, is quite powerful.

After my initial, what is it supposed to look like? panic, I started to look at the pieces.  Two pieces immediately stood out.  Instead of having cuts that were half way through the pieces, one had cuts two-thirds deep and the other one-third deep.  The natural assumption would be that these two pieces make one of the three pairs of the 6-piece burr and that this offset led to the name’s genesis.

With the first pair is established, it is a fairly logical progression to add the others.  One piece of the pair has a knob that sticks out one-third and one of the remaining four pieces has a notch one-third deep.  Three pieces down!  Another piece can’t go anywhere except to be the third piece’s mate.  Four pieces down!  For the last pair, you would be forgiven if you tried to put them in backwards.  It looks like either way may work, but if you pick the wrong one, you will hopefully, quickly realize and rectify the incorrect positioning.  Once you get it correct, it ONLY takes 9 moves to insert that last piece and get the puzzle into its final inaccurate shape.

This puzzle may not be difficult but it is nice addition to a 6-piece burr collection and looks awesome in Marblewood.