The bandaged 3x3x3 with the hopefully most difficult first phase.

• Inventor: Andreas Nortmann
• Mechanism: 3x3x3
• Patents: Unknown
• Producer: Custom
• Year: 2009
• Original Price: $0.00 USD
• Current Price: No Data

This is more than just another bandaged 3x3x3. The configuration of bonds was choosen because it is the one which guarantees the most signatures for phase 1.
The first phase while solving a bandaged cube is usually to move the blocks back into a correct configuration: Without any stickers the cube should not look any different than the solved cube.
The creator now wanted to find the bandaged cube which phase 1 is most difficult. Since there are "just" 7356 different variants (knowledge at that point in time) of bandaged 3x3x3s a program was written to go through all these variants and find the one with the highest of number of configurations.
This variant shown here (with signature 10840080200C21) allows 92176 different signatures.
The stickering scheme was choosen to restrict solving the variant to the aforementioned phase 1. This concept (solving a bandaged cube by configuration only by using an appropriate stickering scheme) was used before Dieter Gebhardt who presented his CAB-Cube during the 13th IPP (International Puzzle Party) in 1993.

In 2011 cubetwist planned to sell this variant and even produced some prototypes as shown in images 5-6.

Thank you to the following people for their assistance in helping collect the information on this page: Lawrence Cuthbert.

This puzzle can be found in collections of these members:

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