Hi Everyone,

I'm pleased to introduce the Jumball, my latest jumbling puzzle. Jumball is a truncated face-turning triakis tetrahedron. It is actually the same shape as Timur's beautiful Skyglobe puzzle, but in this case the quasi-pentagonal faces turn, rather than the hexagonal faces. Jumball has twelve turning faces, and four non-turning (hexagonal) faces, and of course the puzzle jumbles with every move.

Here is the video.

You can also buy Jumball in my Shapeways shop.

And here are some pictures of Jumball:
Enjoy!
Dave

Really impressive!

Thomas

Let me be the second to applaud you for another masterpiece.
There are 6 types of pieces including a pair of chiral ones.

That is a 1:4 for the truncated triakis tetrahedron over the non-truncated triakis tetrahedron.
I must be missing something...

BTW: Very good images.

Thanks for the compliments!
There are actually five piece types visible on the surface of the puzzle (three unique and a pair of chiral parts). Not visible are another three types of pieces (including the core), for a total of eight different part types.
I myself find the non-truncated form more aesthetically appealing, but for a face-turning puzzle too many more parts are needed, with too tenuous a connection to the core. I think the tips would become very unstable. Here's an image of the face-turning triakis tetrahedron:
Edge lengths for Jumball are 1.042", .938", and .902". The dimension from a hexagonal surface to the opposite three-sided vertex is 2.807"

Now I see my mistake.
Good, that we talked about it...

I can't see the images. Is it just me? Maybe due to the change of hosting?

I can't see them either

I have replaced all the images in this post. They should display correctly now.

Nice puzzle Dave. It has a surprisingly good aesthetic appearance for such an odd geometry. I would like to see a version where the hexagonal faces turn as well. Good work.

Sorry for the bump, but I was wondering, David, if you had considered a version which turns on all faces (in other words, this + Skyglobe)?

For this puzzle I was interested in showcasing the jumbling geometry. Although I had certainly given thought to possibilities such as you suggest, I wanted to keep the design as simple as possible, and keep the focus purely on the jumbling.

Interesting... just looked at the Jumball and the Skyglobe together and noticed the cuts of the pentangonal faces of the Skyglobe line up with those seen here. So a merger of these two puzzles would indeed be a very interesting puzzle visually. However, even though those cuts coincide on the surface, they do not in the interior of the puzzle so you'd be talking about a puzzle with many more interior pieces. Still, puzzles with that level of complexity have been made, so I think this is certainly doable.

Carl