School Bus

Designed by Alfons Eyckmans in 2013, my copy of the School Bus was also built for me by Alfons. Alfons had featured the School Bus on his FaceBook page a while back and after seeing it, I shot him an email asking if he could make one for me. 

Alfons will take requests for custom builds of his own designs (of which there are over 200 to-date) but expect to wait no less than a month, since he can only devote 2 days or so a week to puzzle making and he has a lot of orders to fulfil.

Mine is copy #3. Fellow puzzle collector Goetz Schwandtner has a copy and probably the third is kept by Alfons. 

The School Bus is an interlocking burr measuring a relatively large 13cm x 6cm x 5cm. My version is made of Beech for the box frame and Wenge for the pieces. Nice colour combination. Very well built overall with nice finishing; save for several very tiny chips near the edge of one or two of the square holes on the side. Mine was also a bit tight (caused by the local humidity) and I had to leave it in my camera dry box for several days to loosen up the pieces, which became better as I played with it.

The object is the remove the pieces, consisting of 4 regular burr pieces 6 units long and two sliders 13 units long each, from the box.

Despite playing with it on and off over a couple of weeks, I got nowhere with this one. Not even able to remove a single piece. A real tough cookie requiring a total of 72 moves with 18 to get the first piece out. Thank goodness www.puzzlewillbeplayed.com had all the images of the School Bus pieces and I was able to generate a Burr Tools solution to help me solve. No matter tho'; the take apart (and re-assembly) were still very fun using Burr Tools. And even these took a while to complete form start to end.

Inspired by Alfons' School Bus, I took the liberty of expanding upon his design and came up with my own "Tour Bus XL" (after all, what's larger than a school bus?). My design has 2 additional burr pieces and an extra slider, making it dimensionally much larger at 19cm x 8cm x 5cm. 169 moves to completely remove all the pieces.

Tour Bus XL

I am thinking of asking Alfons to make me copy of the Tour Bus XL, but alas, I fear it may be a bit wasted on me, seeing that I can't even solve the School Bus without help.

Vectes / Ghidorah

Name
Vectes / Ghidorah

Designer
Ghidorah - Yavuz Demirhan
Vectes - Alfons Eyckmans

Ghidorah

Vectes

Manufacturer
Eric Fuller. Puzzle(s) were from www.cubicdissection.com for US$89. Currently sold out.

Type & Classification
Both are interlocking burrs

Dimensions
Vectes - 8.8 cm (Height) x 8.8 cm (Width) x 8.8 cm (Depth).
Ghidorah - 6.6 cm (Height) x 6.6 cm (Width) x 6.6 cm (Depth).

Materials & Construction
Walnut, Canarywood and Yellowheart. Quality of construction, fit and finish is of the usual Eric Fuller excellent standards. Very tight tolerances and pieces moved smoothly, but when left out in the open, was not really affected by the humidity and this is due to Eric making them a "looser fit" to begin with.

Overview
This puzzle is rather unusual because its really "two" puzzles combined into one. Both the designers of the Vectes and Ghidorah puzzles had co-incidentally designed a "cage" which was identical for their pieces to fit into. So I suppose you can say I got two puzzles for the price of one; well... more like one and a half puzzles since there was only one cage supplied.

Eric says the Ghidorah is the "warm up" puzzle, meaning its suppose to be easier and the one you should begin with of the two. The Ghidorah has a "simpler" 22.3.4 solution, in that it requires (only) 22 moves to remove the first piece, while the more difficult Vectes has a 37.2.3 solution; 37 moves for the first piece to be extracted from the cage. I am not sure how even the Ghidorah can be considered easier (not easy), not for me at least.

Vectes / Ghidorah with a common cage

The puzzle came disassembled and so it was not a matter of getting the first piece out but rather figuring how to insert the pieces into the cage correctly and solve the puzzle. Using the photo on Eric's website, I tried to see what I could do. But as in interlocking puzzles of this nature, they are usually way beyond me almost always all the time. Without any luck on Ghidorah after quite a while, I didn't even try to attempt the harder Vectes.

But luckily I have learnt to use Burrtools and this as usual came in very handy indeed. However, because the puzzle came unsolved, I had some initial difficulty trying to get the drawings rendered right with the programme. I could only rely on photos of the puzzles in their solved state, not the actual puzzles themselves. So even using the software here was a bit of a challenge.

Difficulty Level
Just two words - Extremely difficult! Made more so by the fact that they are shipped unassembled.

Summary
For me, they are more a collector's puzzles than something that I will play. As one well known puzzle designer has commented, there are puzzle collectors and there are puzzlers solvers, and the two are sometimes mutually exclusive. I definitely fall into the former category.

If anyone wants the Burrtools files for these two puzzles, please feel free to PM me via my profile email.