Does This Heist Make Cents – Penny Bank

One nice thing about Penny Bank is that it is not delivered empty.  And the bank appears to be full to the very top.  Sadly, the bank doesn’t look like it could hold more than a couple dozen pennies.  At least the pennies are the British decimal one penny (1p) coin worth about 1.29 cents US (that’s a whopping $0.0129 each) at today’s exchange rate.  Just for fun, I checked with Wise and there would be a 1.08 GBP fee to convert 24p to US currency.  That’s a pretty heavy price to pay.  I think I’ll just keep the British decimal pennies.

Does it make cents to perform this heist?  Of course it does.  This hobby is a financial black hole and nearly impossible to extract money out of it.  Here’s your chance to accomplish the seemingly impossible.

The Penny Bank is a heavy (really heavy, it must be packed) chunk of metal that was designed and made with a manual lathe and mill by Phil Wigfield of MetalPuzzlesUK (MPUK).  It was used by Asher Simon as his exchange puzzle for International Puzzle Party 41 (IPP41).

The puzzle is a petite (and heavy) cylinder with a slit in the top as you would expect with a coin bank.  You can see from the slit that the top of the bank is quit thick.  Through the slit, you can see a coin right up against the top of the bank.  For anyone that has experience with piggy banks, you recognize this as problematic situation.  The bottom of the bank has a disk stamped with year, 2024, fixed to the cylinder and is the only visible seam on the puzzle.

If I failed to mention it before, this puzzle is heavy.  You can get a nice little workout as you solve it.  You also don’t want to drop it.  It could do quite a bit of damage if it impacted something unprotected.

My first impression was that this Penny Bank would be impossible to burgle.  However, it turned out to be a rather quick solve.  I attribute this to the fact that there aren’t a whole lot of options to try.  In the end, I succeeded in burglarizing the Penny Bank, although to be honest, I’m not much of a hard core criminal since I ended up restocking the bank when I was done.

The puzzle is well made and I found the mechanism to be simple yet quite clever.  Of course, what looks simple to the user may in fact not be simple for the implementer.  And even though, I solved it rather quickly, I could see where others may find it more difficult.  However, if you can’t solve it, it would make an awesome paperweight – because it’s heavy!

3Y + 1W Conjecture – Collatz

A puzzle being solvable is only conjecture until it can be proved that it is possible.  Some folks use fancy shmancy mathematical proofs while the rest of us just bash our heads against it until it yields.  Or doesn’t, in which case, Q.E.D., it is relegated to the obviously unsolvable pile.

On the mathematically unsolvable pile lies the Collatz Conjecture.  The objective of this puzzle by German mathematician Lothar Collatz is to prove that any positive integer can be reduced to 1 in a finite number of steps where at each step the number is divided by 2 if it is even or multiplied by 3 and added to 1 if it is odd.  Yes, puzzlers aren’t the only community to dedicate time to solving capricious whims and fancies.

Taking inspiration from this unsolved mathematical puzzle, Dr. Volker Latussek transmogrified the 3n+1 transformation into 3Y+1W with the objective of reducing it to 1 restricted opening square space.

Collatz by Volker Latussek was Hendrick Haak’s exchange puzzle at the International Puzzle Party (IPP) 41.  It consists of 3 Y pentominoes and 1 W pentomino.  The objective is to place all 4 pentominoes in a 5x5 square.  To help you do this, a 5x5 tray is provided.  To further help you, there is a top on the tray to keep pieces from jumping out while you solve the puzzle.  A small slot in the side provides a convenient way to add the pieces to the tray.  Of course it is slightly offset to keep pieces from simply sliding out.

The puzzle is a nicely made ensemble of 3D printing and Laser Cut Acrylic.  The tray is 3D printed and the 4 pieces and top are laser-cut from Acrylic.  The top has 4 sizeable holes that can be used to manipulate the pieces within the tray.  And it can be slid off so that you can easily store the pieces in the tray so that they don’t fall out.  I came to the conclusion a while ago that all the packing puzzles that I print would have a sliding opening and I’m glad to see others embracing this as well.

So my solving experience went like this: This looks like it might work but I’ll be disappointed if it’s that easy.  Nope, the offset opening doesn’t allow that.  OK – maybe it’s like this, but it would still be too easy.  Nope #2.  Maybe I should think about it for a minute.  How about this – Yup.

It’s not difficult, but you do need to determine how the pieces interact with each other to get them correctly into the tray.  And I wasn’t disappointed!

Puzzle Meta-Storage - Clip Box

I store most of my puzzles in clip boxes and I find it amusing that I will now have to store a Clip Box in a clip box.  In one fell swoop, my storage solution just got elevated to a meta-storage solution.

Clip Box by Yavuz Demirhan was Klaus Kestel’s exchange puzzle at the International Puzzle Party 41 (IPP41).  The Wenge box is nicely made with corner lap joints and a Mahogany floating bottom.  Each of the 2 Padauk (if it’s not Padauk, let me know) clips are cut as a single piece of wood and then beveled.    It’s possible that the 4 pieces are made from White Oak.  But of course, it’s just as possible that they’re not.  Lastly, the steel ball bearing may be made from …. Steel?

Step 1: Figure Out What The Objective Is

The puzzle doesn’t come with written instructions and after hearing 72 puzzle descriptions during the exchange, I hope that I can be forgiven for not remembering the directions for each.  The puzzle consists of 4 wooden pieces and a ball bearing that need to be packed into a box with a clipped opening.   It comes with one of the pieces sticking out of the top of the box.

My assumption was that this is an apparent cube puzzle (good guess considering all the voxels are filled) and that the ball bearing would be on the bottom layer (or at least under one of the clips).  With all the voxels filled, you know that the last piece will just drop in with 1 move.

Step 2: Solve The Puzzle

The first assembly that I tried had a piece in an impossible orientation within the box, so I decided to analyze the various orientations for that piece.  For this particular piece, I found a nice rotation that I thought would be integral to the solve, but of course, I was wrong.  After looking at some possible assemblies, it turned out that the solution was straight-forward and didn’t require any fancy moves.

Step 3: Doubt The Solution And Perhaps the Objective And Make Up Some New Objectives

I felt like I was missing a constraint with this puzzle.  The solution that I found required only 5 of the 7 open voxels at the top of the box.  So I thought maybe I should try to make an apparent cube with any 3 of the four pieces with the ball bearing trapped inside.  Although all 4 combinations are possible, none of them were very challenging.

Step 4: Continue Doubting And Keep Strategizing New Objectives

I then used that nice rotation I found and built an apparently overflowing cube with pieces sticking 1 voxel higher than the top of the box for the 7 voxels not covered by the clips.  However, there were other solutions to this format that didn’t require that fancy rotation.

Step 5: Seek Advice And Completely Solve The Puzzle

I reached the point where I thought it best to get some advice and placed a post on the Mechanical Puzzle Discord (MPD).  In hindsight, I should have guessed the response that I received.  My assumption about the objective was correct but there are 2 solutions!

Dedicating a little more time, I discovered the second solution, which turned out to be more interesting than the original solution that I found.   Altogether, I got a lot of puzzling out of this little guy.

Not Curly Burl – Curly Burr N8

I like all sorts of puzzles, but I still consider myself to be a burr guy.  As such, I always look forward to Frans de Vreugd’s International Puzzle Party (IPP) exchange puzzle every year.  This year’s puzzle, Curly Burr N8, was designed by Frans himself and made by Pelikan using Maple and Merbau.  Should have been Curly Burl Maple – just sayin.  However, one of my pieces is curly on the end.

The information that comes with the puzzle indicates that it has a unique level 8 solution.  This means that it takes 8 moves to remove the first piece from a fully assembled puzzle.  Unfortunately (or fortunately), it comes unassembled and there are quite a few required moves before the last piece gets put in.  And they forgot to mark the piece the goes in last.  Of course, being the expert burr puzzler that I am, I started with that piece as the first piece.

I always enjoy solving 6 piece burrs.  I start by taking the pieces and examining them.  Each piece is new and has its own specific role to play in the solution dance.  This ensemble has a pair of twins, which helps to reduce the complexity a bit.  While experimenting with the pieces, you develop a feel for how the notches and nobs are used and given the nature of these particular pieces, how the pieces have to move to start a disassembly process.

I worked on one assembly for a while, but was not able to get to the finish line with it.  As difficult as it is to break away from a potentially promising assembly, I reversed some of the pieces to successfully solve the puzzle.  Along the way, I discovered that the piece that I started out with needed to be the last piece, and I found it a bit of a dexterity problem to hold all the pieces in place as I juggled the remaining pieces to swap it out and then reintroduced it later.  Once it was added, it was just a matter of manipulating the pieces to close it up.

This puzzle does have a red herring.  I was continually puzzled by an aspect of one of the pieces.  After solving the puzzle, I was left wondering if it had been used without me noticing it.  So, I carefully disassembled it while keeping a close eye on this piece and I was left with the impression that it had more capability than was being used.  Next, I looked at all the pieces.  It was then that I realized that this feature was not there for the solution but for the manufacturing.  I approve - well done!

As of this writing, there are still copies available for purchase on Pelikan’s website.  If you are a burr person like myself, I highly recommend getting it.