Hi Puzzlers,

I finally went and dug out all of the older puzzles I made, so I figured I'd show them all in this post. Here's a photo of the collection: Starting from the bottom, the first puzzle is a holographic sliding block puzzle. I developed this in (I think) 1995, and it lead to my first patent. The next row up are all variations of the 2x3x3 puzzle, which I used to test various building techniques and rapid prototyping technologies. These were built between 1998 and 2002. My favorite is the last one with the green arcs. Several really nice patterns can be made with this puzzle.

In the next row is my 2x2x3 cuboid with a custom (from scratch) mechanism, then a hex nut puzzle which is just a shape mod of the UFO. I found the original UFO much too hard to turn to be playable, so I transformed it. Last in this row are two face-turning octahedrons. These were the first samples of the FTO with a mechanism robust enough for actual use. I filed for a patent on the mechanism, but by the time it was allowed (in 2005), I had decided it would not be the best investment to spend more money on it, so the patent never issued.

The top row starts with a 3x3x5 cuboid from 2001, which is a transformation of a normal cube. I believe this was the first fully functional puzzle of it's type. When I made it extended cubes were popular on the old Twisty Megasite, and I asked someone (possibly Wayne) if the extensions turned. The response I got was that they couldn't since the cubies would fall off mid-turn, so naturally I had to make this puzzle. Next is a face turning rhombic dodecahedron from 2003. This is possibly the earliest example of a jumbling puzzle. The last puzzle is a pentagonal dipyramid that I made in 2005 while I was developing Fracture-10. It turns on the equatorial edges and the two polar vertexes.

Here are a few closer shots of some groups:
And now you are fully caught up on all the puzzles I made, but had not published until now.

Enjoy!
Dave

NICE!!!! I really like that pentagonal dipyramid. Thanks for the bit of history.

I just came back from lunch where the news in the background was about some new Dr. Seuss storys getting published so based on the name of this thread I was half expecting something Dr. Seuss related. (Just an odd side bar...)

Carl

Wow! So many awesome puzzles. The rhombic dodecahedron is the Rua, right?

I feel so young now, at least I'm older than jumbling

I hope you'll put the dipyramid on Shapeways in the future! It looks like a very fun one.

And yeah, the face-turning rhombic dodecahedron was designed by the.drizzle as the Rua, but yours predates it!

The pentagonal dipyramid is very interesting. It is equivalent to an pentagonal prism. Can you post some additional images of it?
Do you have a proof that you invented the Rua in 2003? I am asking because of the museum's entry.

Thanks everyone for the nice comments. I'll answer a few specific things here...This would have been much more interesting! But sadly, the reality is not so big a story
I hadn't planned on doing this, since as Andreas notes it is the equivalent of a pentagonal prism. But I won't rule it out.
Here are a few additional images of the pentagonal dipyramid:
Two things I can offer (besides my word). First, note the light gray material. This is a color that Stratasys discontinued from their line several years ago. So although this does not prove the exact date, it does show that the puzzle is many years old. Other than that, I have the original Solidworks files that are dated (and unchanged) from August and September of 2003, when the puzzle was designed and made.

Wow, very cool. Any possibility of putting the FTRD on Shapeways? Of course your Rhombic 18 puzzle offers this plus additional turns, but personally I prefer the elegance of basic face-turning polyhedra. At least, to start with!

Sorry for the bump, but I just wanted to ask: David, do you have pictures of the internals of your FTOs? I just want to see the inside of the first ones.

I never did take pictures of the insides as I was assembling them, but here's a link to the patent application in Google's database. The drawings there are a bit simplified (no filleting, etc.), but they show the basic structure well enough.

Thanks very much! I was mostly wondering how it differed from this design, which predates yours but was apparently never built.

The shells in your design make me wonder whether it turns better than the currently available mass-produced versions (IMO, LanLan's is the best by far). Do you have any of those to compare?

I just hope someone can mass-produce the FTRD - I've been wanting one for a while now but they're only on Shapeways (coughcoughsoexpensivecough).

I actually started to build one of these to see how well it might work, but found that due to the geometry the width of the "feet" holding pieces in was so limited that the puzzle would never stay together very long. I also cited this patent in my application.I own a couple mass-produced octahedrons, and they work far better than my prototypes. But that is to be expected since the prototypes were built using FDM, and there is a lot of catching on the build layers. If all of the surfaces were smooth there would be no reason they wouldn't work as well as the mass produced versions.Is the face-turning rhombic dodec available on Shapeways? I was thinking of making my version available in my shop. It would still be a bit pricey, although not as much as the Rhombic 18.