Wednesday, 29 April 2015

Find The Lid

"Find The Lid" is an interesting trick opening "box" from Tatiana Matveeva of Russia. This was her exchange puzzle at IPP34 in London last year. It's not really a box per se, but six panels with notches interlocked together to form a cube.



The object, as what the name says...is to find the lid (and open the box). The panels are numbered from 1 to 6. Overall construction of the box is good and the panels all appear to be laser cut and fit nicely. Inside there is a coin (a Russian 10 Koiieek) thrown in for good measure (as I later found out after opening the lid) to be discovered.





Its obvious that to find the lid, one would have to press, tug or pull each of the six panels to see which one will move. I quite easily found the single panel that could move but the puzzle is not so straight forward. The panel moved about 1 to 2 mm and thereafter got stuck. It is held back by some restraining mechanism. Ha! not so simple after all!

It took me several minutes trying before I figured out the "trick". Not a totally new or novel locking mechanism that holds the lid, but pretty cleverly applied to this puzzle, considering the puzzle is no bigger than 6cm all round and each of the panels is only about 8mm thick.

No force is needed here. In fact if force is used, the puzzle could possibly end up damaged, especially the internals. A nice exchange puzzle, thanks Tatiana!

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