Staircase Puzzle Fidget Puck

myminifactory

The fun of this puzzle is that it looks like it should simply fall apart in your hand, but in actual fact it is very difficult to take apart. Because of this it is kind of fun to fidget with, there are lots of different angles and shapes and it feels very loose. I include the word "puzzle" in the name because it is held together with keys/tabs/knobs that look just like a jigsaw puzzle. Everyone who picked it up assumed it was a puzzle, and so I spent a lot of time making it possible to take apart. Unfortunately the ease or impossibility of taking it apart is very dependent on the quality of the print. I designed this in Openscad, but I did not mark this as customizable because it is incredibly dependent on how the settings interact whether it can be disassembled or not. I have included the source file so people can see how I did it, and possibly work on making it customizable. I include the word "Puck" because I am from Canada, and it reminded me of a hockey puck. I doubt it would last very long in a hockey game. I include the word "Staircase" because that seems to be the other word that my family were always using to describe the shape it makes. I was thinking of calling it a "Penrose Staircase" as it is possible to make the steps continue to infinity by dropping the top stair so that it meshes and becomes the bottom stair. Technically the Penrose staircase is an optical illusion, so I decided not to use that name. The inspiration came from a YouTube video of a cast metal puzzle, but this is a little less of a puzzle and more of a fidget puck that sometimes looks like a staircase, and this is made of plastic which is much softer than cast metal, which causes different problems. I also did not re-create the shape of that puzzle(and to be fair, I didn't re-create the actual shape of a hockey puck either). Note that I did not have one of Hanayama puzzles to look at or measure, this was created entirely by me. You can find the video by searching "Hanayama Cast Spiral Puzzle" but beware, the video that pops up is showing the solution to that puzzle. The solution to this puzzle is similar to the Hanayama puzzle, but it is possible that your printer will result in more possible solutions, or perhaps no solution at all. Please send me a comment if you can print one that can be solved. #3Dpuzzles @MyMiniFactory @MakeAnything3D