Hello,

I'm happy to announce that cubesmith.com is up!!

All of my stickers are up with pictures, and available for purchase. I will be adding more items as they are available as well as accepting suggestions for future cube sticker sets.

Thanks to all that have orderd in the past, I hope that it is a little easier to order now.

Thanks
Chris

very very nice! I know for one that Adam's stickers are great...but he is very hard to contact. These stickers look equally as good, and are easy to order! How think are the tiles by the way? Are they at all comparable to the thickness of the rubik's deluxe tiles?

Quinn

Actually the tiles are very thin, .010". They have addhesive already applied to the back, you just peel the liner and stick them.

Thanks
Chris

Hi Chris,

For your 3x3x3 stickers.....are they rounded? And can you give me the dimension (size) of the sticker? Thanks~

~Joseph

Joseph, those were his stickers originally on your Evil Twin. The replacements I gave you were also his.

They Rule!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IMHO


buy 10 sets now!!!!!!!!!

Thanks for the info. I nearly forgot about where I got those stickers from. Awesome....btw....Quinn...his stickers are just as good as Adam's stickers~

Whoa you can make custom logos on the stickers? Ohh the possibilities...

That's what I was thinking. Even a nice sticker set for a calendar cube would be good.

Also, have you considered making Alexander Star replacement stickers? I got mine from Adam when he made stickers, but most people who have an Alexander Star will have one with crappy stickers.

I will have nice Calendar sets soon. I can make the Alexadars Star as well. I made some for myself to do a custom 5 color sticker mod that came out pretty nice. I saw someone do it on these boards in the past but can't remember who.

Anyway, I will have some new sets up next week, as I'm getting some more colors in. I'll make some A. Star's and Megaminx first.

Chris

It was me!
http://twistypuzzles.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2882&highlight=easy+alexanders+star+mod
Carter made one too.

-mike

you could make pattern stickers for people that are color blind! we already have blind cubes, but i haven't seen any cubes for color blind people before...

Smapla,

Could you show me an exaple or give me some more info? I could definatley make patterened sticker sets.

Chris

Maybe like this:

Would dots like dice pips be too hard to distinguish quickly?

My brother is colorblind too and he couldn't tell the difference between some of the colors on a Rubik's cube. If you offer something like this, I'd buy a couple of sets and send a cube to my brother.

Or you could go the other way and have little tiny bums instead of dice pips. You be the Judge?

http://twistypuzzles.com/cgi-bin/puzzle.cgi?pid=522

Shoud the patterns be strictly black and white? If all the patterns are black/white or at least one color and white, I can make a set pretty quickly. Infact, I'm trying to get the calandar cube sets ready this week and I could work that into the same run.

Let me know as much as you can because I'm very unfamiliar with color blindness.

Chris

Most colourblind people are just red-green colour blind though (so no stickers that are red, green, or colours that contain red or green in them), so you could have a set with colours just for them too I suppose. The second most common is yellow-blue colour blindness. Complete colour blindess is very rare, and if you know anyone like that he's likely in demand for testing at universities

I'm not exactly sure which one he has but I do know he has a hard time telling the difference between Pink and Light Blue. He says they look the same to him. Once when I was solving in fromt of him he said he couldn't tell the colors apart for the most part.

He doesn't see in just Black and White though.

My brother-in-law is colorblind and the one thing I remembered him telling me was that anything green looked white to him. The example he used was that when he was at a traffic light, the green light was white. I don't recall what he said about other colors though, but I think he said the red looked different to him in some way.

It only took 4 days for my stickers to arrive to Canada Thanks!

I just applied the first set to my 2x2, and they're terrific. The only thing (and this is small) is that I would have preferred a true blue (always the side I solve first), and the sets I got all had a purplish tinge to the blue (unless my eyes are just wrong). I don't have any original cubes from the 80s, so maybe what I now have in the stickers is a closer colour to that anyway (someone tell me). But nonetheless, I think this was an excellent deal for vinyl stickers, and I wish I had time to apply them to my 4x4

It's like having a new cube, as my old stickers really looked bad, with the clear plastic layer peeling. Where it had come off completely, the colour was torn off (and white paper showing).

For some reason on my cubes, the white side is always okay, so I kept it for the 2x2, and I'm going to do the same for the 4x4 (to keep the logo).

I agree on the blue as well, I have a new one that I just got in that I think looks much nicer.

Trust me, choosing the colors has been the most time consuming part of this whole project. Hopefully I now have a standard 6 color cube set that will appeal to most people.

I also am going to start listing stickers for individual sides of the 3x3, so people can pick and choose there own color scheme, including as many non-standard colors as I have.

Thanks
Chris

Well, back in the day when Meffert was looking for ideas on colouring ideas for a new puzzle, one of the things I suggested to him was a puzzle appropriate for colour blind people. I suggested he make one side black, one side white, the rest of them varying shades of grey. With only 6 sides on a standard cube, the 6 shades should be distinguishable enough for pretty much anyone. L8r.

Hmmm yeah that makes sense. and than you wouldn't have to worry about orienting the centers like a picture cube.

Exactly. Here's a basic mockup (just slapped together in a few seconds) of the various shades I was thinking of. Brightnesses are 0, 51, 102, 153, 204 and 255. 51's a little hard to see in this context, but would probably stand out pretty well when put onto a cube. You can also save on the cost of stickers this way, too, as you can keep one side empty like a "goth cube". L8r.

I only have 1 shade of grey vinyl, and couldn't use the other shades for anything but these really. If I happen to collect enough grey in the future, I'll offer some of those then.

It would be much easier for me to print the patterns on white, in a single color (Black or otherwise). I can make the patterns so they are oriented correct no matter wich direction they are twisted.

If no ones opposed to that idea I'll start to work on the patterns and post them when they are ready to see if you guys like them.

Let me know what you guys think a good color to print them in also.

Thanks
Chris

Hmm....six designs with rotational symmetry....

1) Completely blank white
2) White circle on black vinyl
3) White plus sign or X on black vinyl
4) Completely black vinyl
5) Black circle on white vinyl
6) Black plus or X on white vinyl

Make the oppostite colors part on opposite sides of the cubes. I don't know anything about screen printing, but would this make the thing easier to setup since you only are really making two patterns?

Yes, that was along the lines I was thinking, except yours sound very easy.


I'll try and put some together this weekend.


Chris

I have the Calendar Cube sets ready to ship. Check out the pictures at my site.

http://www.cubesmith.com

Thanks

Chris

Excellent! I've ordered a few, and, I'm anxiously awaiting them.

If you're taking requests, how about a Japanese calendar cube?

Dang, dude! I've been thinking about that for years! :-/ The only thing really holding me up is not finding decent pictures of an actual Japanese calendar to find out what's written in Kanji, Kana, and romanised. L8r.

I could definatly make them, if someone wants to give me the right info. I font would be best I guess, if that's possible. That would give me the most options and keep the image the sharpest.

Chris

Wow!
I love that Kanji cube! Looks awesome.
I would love to have one!
Vadim

This isn't ideal, but, it's what I used for the mockup, 48 point MS UI Gothic.

I could probably do something better, how many pixels wide should each square be?

Do I need to install a language pack fo view that file? I just get boxes where the Japanese should be.

Chris

Probably. On my Windows XP machine, I went to the "Regions and Language Options" Control Panel, and under the "Languages" tab, I selected "Install files for East Asian languages".

Chris will you sell Prism or Hologram stickers (3x3)?
The Prism ones found at Rubik.com cost a fortune when shipping overseas not counting the customs agency's whole process and all...

OK, looking at the file you provided, it looks like we'll need

Top left: nichi, getsu, ka, sui, moku, kin, do = 7
Top middle: you = 1
Top right: bi = 1

Middle left: juu = 1
Centre: ichi, ni, san, yon, go, roku, nana, hachi, kyuu, juu = 10
Middle right: gatsu = 1

Bottom left: ni, san = 2
Bottom middle: juu = 1
Bottom right: ichi, ni, san, yon, go, roku, nana, hachi, kyuu, juu = 10

All together, that comes to 34 stickers, broken down as 20 corners, 4 edges... and 10 centres. It looks like it may not be possible to do it after all. Oh well... it was a pleasant thought while it lasted.

Oh yee of little faith! It turns out, there is a solution, and, it's quite an elegant one at that!

Every single square gets used--although, there are logical duplicates.

So, here's the layout,

For the days of the week, you use three corner cubes, and one edge cube,
edge - yo, yo
corner - monday, wednesday, friday
corner - tuesday, thursday, bi
corner - saturday, sunday, bi

For the months, all six centers, and ten edges,
center - blank
center - blank
center - one
center - one
center - two
center - two
edge - one, gatsu
edge - two, gatsu
edge - three, gatsu
edge - four, gatsu
edge - five, gatsu
edge - six, gatsu
edge - seven, gatsu
edge - eight, gatsu
edge - nine, gatsu
edge - ten, gatsu

For the day of the month, one edge, and four corners,
corner - blank, two, three
edge - blank, ten
corner - one, two, three
corner - four, five, six
corner - seven, eight, nine

I'm pretty sure it's solvable, too! I've attached a file with the layout, let me know what you think.

Huh, this is kinda off topic but...
Being Chinese, reading those Japanese symbols doesnt quite translate accurately, but it is still rather interesting... The Japanese borrowed Chinese symbols at one point and adapted them for their own use, and most of the symbols are entirely legible as Chinese characters, their meanings however are different. So, as I'm reading these Japanese characters, it translates into Chinese:

日曜日　sunday: Day of the Sun
月曜日　monday: Day of the Moon
火曜日　tuesday: Day of Fire
水曜日　wednesday: Day of Water
木曜日　thursday: Day of Wood
金曜日　friday: Day of Gold
土曜日　saturday: Day of Earth

Does it translate the same way in Japanese? In Chinese, the days of the week literally translate "day one, day two," etc.

Yeah, it's interesting, turns out, they're Chinese translations of the original Greek,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_the_week

Hey guys,

I'm just popping in to let you know that as soon as I find my XP disk I'll install that language pack and take a look at these. I'm still very much interested in producing them as soon as we get a final design.

Since I don't speak any Japanese I'll leave it up to you guys to make sure it's right.

Chris

Took a bit of work, but, I've got a layout that you can look at!

This doesn't necessarily have to be the final design, but, it should give you a good idea of what it'll look like.

Actually, I can't read Japanese, either--everything I know about the calendar I learned from Wikipedia. The numbers, however, I do know, from Mah Jong.

Here's another one, colored like the original Dutch version.

I think it looks pretty snazzy!

Edit: I found a typo, the bottom-left cube has a duplicated Friday, it should be a Wednesday, I've uploaded a corrected version.

I like the second one better, how about you?

So are you certain that this arrangment will work? If so I can get going on this pretty soon. I might be able to have finished sets by next week.

Chris

Oh definitely. The first was just to test the layout. The only thing left is smoothing out the jaggies, I used a 100pt font, so there should be enough detail for you to work with. I'm sure printing, with all the different colored vinyl, and ink isn't going to be easy!



I'm pretty sure that the characters as layed out will all fit in their respective locations, but, I'm not entirely certain if it's completely "solvable" from a calender point of view...



That's excellent news! Who knows, maybe this will take off? As far as I know, this is totally unique!

If you can't read Japanese, here's a key.

Hi,
I like calendar cubes and collect the different languages that came out and currently have the German, Dutch and English versions.

I know there is also a French version. You can find pictures of this one on http://www.puzzle-shop.de/start-museum.html, click on 'Original Rubik's' on the right side and scroll down to 'Rubiks France Calendar'. However, I have never seen this one in real life and neither on ebay. Does any of you know anything about the French version?

Furthermore I am also very much interested in other languages of the calendar cube that might have been sold in the stores.

Stefan

This is the french cube that I have.

Just bumping this since I'm interested too.

Jello, the white layout looks good