Spiral 3D Puzzle based on woodpuzzle

thingiverse

The Story behind the Puzzle: Before 3D printers you had to make things out of wood. 34 years ago, I spotted an article in Wood Magazine Feb 1987, a 3D wood puzzle block. I made several of these puzzles and I still have one on a shelf for visitors to try out. I thought this puzzle would be fun to try to design and build on the 3D printer. I have to say that plastic or wood filament results do not have the enduring look of a nice wood puzzle. However, it was a fun challenge to try to design this puzzle on the FreeCAD Computer Aided Design software. How to get all the curves, and to make it the same from 2 directions on the puzzle? Another challenge was how to print the puzzle out. I thought printing it as one block would allow me to introduce multiple filament colors to try to match the wood design. However, experiments came out with solid blocks of parts that would not separate. A one-piece puzzle cube would not quite be the same challenge. The alternative design revision required extracting individual parts from the computer software design, and then individually printing out all the parts. Eventually these experiments resulted in printing a couple different sizes of the puzzle and trying multiple filament colors. I still like the texture and the feel of the wood puzzle over the 3D printed results. But thought I would share some of the pictures of the results of this journey.