Self-Made Lego Sliding Puzzle

A while back, I chanced upon several YouTube video clips which showed sliding puzzles made out of Lego bricks. One video in particular, by someone named "Mahj" gave pretty good instructions with Flickr photos of how to go about building one. This caught my interest and I thought a Lego puzzle was something interesting (and relatively easy) for me to build on my own.

After some research on the internet, I discovered Bricklink was THE place for getting Lego bricks, whatever the quantity, colour, type or size. Bricklink is a site which consists of an aggregation of over 5,400 Lego brick sellers from all over the world, somewhat similar to Ebay stores. If you can't find what you want on Bricklink, it probably doesn't exist! The seller from which I got all my little bricks and parts from is aptly known as Missing Bricks based in the USA. I selected the required number and type of bricks needed and duly placed my online order. Some of the colours were not available so I had to make do with what I could get. My package of Lego bricks promptly arrived at my home about a week and a half later.

Using Mahj's photos as a step by step guide, I actually managed to constructed a pretty nice looking puzzle for myself (if I may say so). Instead of numbers in the traditional 15 Puzzle, I decided to use alphabets and created a sentence on the sliding tiles. Below is my own homemade Lego sliding puzzle from start to finish.

Photo 1: All the bricks laid out and ready for assembly

Photo 2: Building the base

Photo 3: Adding the structure for the sliding tiles

Photo 4: Completing the structure for the sliding tiles

Photo 5: Adding the smooth surfaced red sliding tiles

Photo 6: Completion of the red sliding tiles leaving one
tile empty. Making sure all the tiles slide smoothly

Photo 7: Alphabet stickers; effective and inexpensive
For those with large hands, use a pair of tweezers

Photo 8: Pasting the alphabets on the red tiles and
putting everything together 

Photo 9: Completed Lego Sliding Puzzle