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!