Hi,

My brother-in-law is the director of a metal company, and this company owns a machine that can create metal objects (especially Aluminum/Aluminium) from 3d thread models.

He offered me to make a metal cube if I would provide him with an AutoCAD model (or model of another design program) of the exact shapes of the pieces. Does anyone know where I can find such a model?

Thanks,

Ron
http://www.speedcubing.com

Nice to hear about metal cubes, but the molds will eat into his wallet I guess
It would be credible to ask Wayne or others into prototyping on PC software to help you out though, let us know what happens OK, THX!!

It would be great to have access to such a aluminum model building machine! But I wouldn't make an ordinary metal 3x3x3 cube. Besides, production brass and silver 3x3x3 cubes already exist. This is what I would do....

You could make aluminum mold inserts for any puzzle designed on CAD. These aluminum inserts could then be fit into a standard steel mold frame. (With Aluminum molds you won't get the life of a full production mold, but it would be acceptable for making parts for say a hundred puzzles or so.) You could then hire a molding house to do a one-time-setup plastic injection molding run for all the parts for the 100+ puzzles. The parts could then be distributed to all the investors (rare twisty puzzle collectors) of the project as a "do-it-yourself puzzle assembly kit". Each "investor" would then do the assembly and stickering of their own puzzle. Wah la! 100+ extremely rare twisty puzzles with reasonably limited investment and labor costs per puzzle.

In theory it could work this way, but it would be difficult to properly coordinate. So, is Wayne's 6x6x6 cube design ready yet.

Doug.

I like this idea! You need to pick a puzzle that is:

Hard to build from a common puzzle
Very uncommon
A puzzle that Twisty members don't already have, so you can take advantage of free marketing.
Start with something easy.

My vote for your first one would be a Dino cube.