This is my latest puzzle the X-Skewb:



The "donor" cube is a truncated face turning octahedron (or master skewb if you prefer). The add-on pieces were designed in SketchUp, printed by Shapeways in WSF, dyed using Rit dye, stickers by Oliver's Stickers.

Unlike Eitan's version the Octex which had pieces attached by magnets, here the edge triangles on the X faces are angled back to allow the puzzle to turn (the stickers are slightly recessed to protect them).

You guys might not believe this, but I designed this without knowing about the Octex Which is why I posted this in New Puzzles. I looked in the Museum to see if this had already been done, but I missed it (it is in the section with 477 puzzles!). I was going to call mine the X-Skewb

<edit> Since this puzzle has missing pieces compared to the Octex, I think that it can be considered a different puzzle so I will call it an X-Skewb</edit>

Awesome puzzle! Is it the same as Eitan's Octex?

Can I ask you guys: is this an Octex, or can I call it an X-Skewb?

It's missing 8 pieces to be an octex, so nope, it can't be considered as such

Thanks for that Greg (and Luke by pm), I will edit this topic to highlight the name change to X-Skewb.

I consider it as "sufficiently new".
Thank you for editing the images.I wait for the possibility to change this, too.

@Andreas

The dimensions are 73x73x70mm, it weighs 214g.

Well.... I guess I'll agree with Andreas here. I like the addition of the stickers on the top and bottom edge pieces. Are they recessed at all, to make sure they don't get scraped off?

If you make another one, you should take the 2-color pieces on the equatorial edges of the puzzle (i.e. those without yellow or white), and make them smaller, so that the X really stands out.

-Eitan

I like the fact that the upper and lower faces on yours are divided into equal squares. That's a nice distinguishing touch too.Eitan's got a cool idea here. Perhaps these faces could be angled in a similar manner to the small edge faces.

Will you make this avalible in your shop? I would love to own this.

Yes I did think about doing this, or stickering the puzzle to make the X really obvious. Maybe next time.

I'll make this available on my shop ASAP.

I really like this design. I was quite surprised to see you designed this in sketchup. Did you just printed extensions? I'm really curious to learn more about this process I have a bunch of sketchup files of ideas for 3x3 mods. Is there anything in particular that you have to do get these to print right?

These are just extensions glued onto a face turning octahedron, but I have designed and printed a full puzzle using SketchUp.

I use some free Ruby plugins for SketchUp to get the designs to look right and print properly:

To round the edges I use RoundCorner. See CatchUp 9 for details on how to use this plugin.
To check that an object is manifold I use solidinspector.
To export the model to stl I use skp_to_dxf, but now that Shapeways allows collada this may not be necessary.
To make a shell I have used tt_shell but this does not always work, so I do a lot of shelling manually.

One hint is to do the model in metres (that is, 1000x full size) to avoid some SketchUp issues when it tries to create small triangles, but when uploading to Shapeways say the model is in mm. Also, use the component feature in SU, as this saves a LOT of work when you have many similar parts.

I have added this puzzle to My Shapeways Shop if anyone is interested.

Note that you will have to buy a face turning octahedron and slightly truncate it across two tips and along the edges for the pieces to fit. pm me for more details, or if you are interested in buying a fully assembled and stickered puzzle.