Hi!

Some time ago, Oskar presented a puzzle named Gear Skewb that should actually be called Gear Master Skewb because it had 3 layers.

The puzzle I'm showing today is a "real" Gear Skewb with 14 (8 corners and 6 face centers) pieces that appear after dissecting a solid with 4 corresponding layers. The Gear Skewb name was already occupied, so I called it Skewb des Soleils - because face gears look like an image of the sun. Orientation of the suns is not visible (unless we make a "super" version), so this puzzle is not very difficult to solve.

Having already designed a Gear Halpern-Meier Tetrahedron, I didn't have to spend much time designing this one, because I only had to extend the outer faces and cut them in a different way. By the way, it was Doug Roth from this forum, who proposed to make a cubic version of the Gear HMT, which he bought from me and had a chance to play with.

YouTube Video
Skewb des Soleils is available in my Shapeways Shop

Timur

Wonderful. Great work as always!

SUPER Puzzle

Another gorgeous creation, I love it!

Absolutely BEAUTIFUL!!!

It sooooo cute!,

I would like to eat one of this creatures.

Another beautiful creation. Congrats. I should have mentioned this puzzle in my post over in the "Piece Orbits on the Master Skewb" thread as its another great example of the point I was trying to make. Note the 8 corners are actually sets of 4 in 2 different orbits and this puzzle makes that obvious as the corners in the different orbits are different shapes.

This also makes me wonder what your idea of a Gear 2x2x2 would look like. Oskar gave us Gear Shift which appears to be a contender but that puzzle doesn't actually make the 2x2x2 like turns.

Carl

I'm pretty sure a Gear 2x2 would be a puzzle in which 4 of the corner pieces (of the tetrahedral symmetry group) are gears and can rotate independently, and the other 4 corners have the notches for the gears to rotate in. Although in order to prevent the puzzle from jamming due to identical gears colliding, the gears would have to be designed to allow them to mesh with each other...

Great puzzle as always,,
The looks of it more like an ancient symbol of Sun..

Maulana

I think that only makes sense if the resulting puzzle is limited to 180 degree turns. If the puzzle still allows 90 degree turns I would think all the corners could be made identical. They all exist in the same orbit that way.

And while we are talking about deep cut geared puzzles... another puzzle which has always reminded me of the Skewb is the Pentultimate. Seeing as it has the large orientationless face centers and 3 colored corners. I'm now wondering if a Geared Pentultimate could be constructed that would look similar to this with a large sun shaped gear in the center of each face. Appearances aside though the Pentultimate is a very different puzzle so I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't possible.

Carl

I think I'm yet to find one of Timur's creations that I don't find absolutely incredible. Beautiful work as always!

What a puzzle!You couldn't resist to correct that "mistake", could you?
What are the size and the weight?

If all the gears were the same size then it would be possible to add in the 2x2x2 moves. The interesting part is getting it so the two separate halves in a 2x2x2 move can't rotate independently in the middle is an interesting challenge.

Wow, that rocks!
Very nice job, Timur!

-Doug

Veryy nice, one thing though
The space between the pieces seems awfully big to me? Was it necessary to keep the mech stable?

Cool looking puzzle Timur, and a great name for it too.

Edge length is 51 mm, weight is 42 g.
There's space between pieces only in outer (geared) layer, so it not for mech stability. These spaces are fully determined by gearing ratio - without them the gears would just not work.