G'day Folks!
I've had trouble focussing on my normal duties this week because the mod bug has bitten me. My garden looks like a jungle. My dayjob...I can't actually remember what I do. My family look at me with blank stares. My wife says she doesn't know who I am anymore.
When I realised the utter thrill and sheer sense of power involved in modifying twisty puzzles, I was hooked. And to hone my skills, I decided to attempt one of the oldest mods. A favourite, and a great beginner's mod.
When I realised the utter thrill and sheer sense of power involved in modifying twisty puzzles, I was hooked. And to hone my skills, I decided to attempt one of the oldest mods. A favourite, and a great beginner's mod.
I present my Half-Truncated Cube.
For those who are interested or incredibly bored, here are the highlights and lowlights of my journey.
I began with a white Cube4You 3x3x3 cube and cut each of 4 sets of corner/edge until they looked like this.
Then I took all the cut pieces out (12 edges and 4 corners) and made caps for them with some plastic sheet. I superglued them on and let them dry overnight.
The next day I got out my files and filed the caps down as much as possible. Then I took to them with some wet and dry. It's not a perfect joined finish, but it's a lot better!
To check how things were progressing, I put all the pieces back into the puzzle. Mostly, things looked good. There were one or two pieces which just refused to become the correct shape and so in the end, I left them. This is not against the rules for a 2nd mod.
By this stage I was pretty happy. Things were going well apart from one problem. The capping sheet was a noticeably different colour from the cubies. I investigated different ways of turning the sheet into the correct colour. In the end I decided, for better or worse, that I'd spray paint the whole lot black.
(I originally bought some white cubes with the idea that I'd make all my mods white, but after working with them, I won't do any more in white.)
So, into the shed they went, and you can see them here laid out nice and neatly. They're held up by some wonderful stuff called BluTak. This is the same stuff I used to keep the crazy planet cubes center caps in place.
Once painted, they looked like this.
And the BluTak? Well, now it's BlackTak...
Now I really liked the look of the pieces and when they were put back into the puzzle, they looked even better. Black tends to hide imperfections better, and for me, this was a very good thing!
Unfortunately, I found (wiser heads will say "I could have told you that") that when the pieces were turned, some of the paint scraped off. This was almost always on some of the internals, but when those internals were exposed in a scramble, it didn't look good.
I decided to spray the pieces with some clear gloss in an attempt to seal in the paint. I think by and large this worked fairly well. It's not the ideal thing, but it's better than having splotchy black and white pieces.
The last step of the process was cutting most of the stickers. I used the colours that came with the C4U cube originally. But of course I needed four more colours as well. For this, I turned to my recently purchased CubeSmith sticker sheets and chose my four colours. I think this colour scheme is a much more standard sort than my Mini Rumbling Prism.
And the final result?
It almost looks semi-professional!
Here's the puzzle after a half turn.
The checkerboard pattern...
To check how things were progressing, I put all the pieces back into the puzzle. Mostly, things looked good. There were one or two pieces which just refused to become the correct shape and so in the end, I left them. This is not against the rules for a 2nd mod.
By this stage I was pretty happy. Things were going well apart from one problem. The capping sheet was a noticeably different colour from the cubies. I investigated different ways of turning the sheet into the correct colour. In the end I decided, for better or worse, that I'd spray paint the whole lot black.
(I originally bought some white cubes with the idea that I'd make all my mods white, but after working with them, I won't do any more in white.)
So, into the shed they went, and you can see them here laid out nice and neatly. They're held up by some wonderful stuff called BluTak. This is the same stuff I used to keep the crazy planet cubes center caps in place.
Once painted, they looked like this.
And the BluTak? Well, now it's BlackTak...
Now I really liked the look of the pieces and when they were put back into the puzzle, they looked even better. Black tends to hide imperfections better, and for me, this was a very good thing!
Unfortunately, I found (wiser heads will say "I could have told you that") that when the pieces were turned, some of the paint scraped off. This was almost always on some of the internals, but when those internals were exposed in a scramble, it didn't look good.
I decided to spray the pieces with some clear gloss in an attempt to seal in the paint. I think by and large this worked fairly well. It's not the ideal thing, but it's better than having splotchy black and white pieces.
And the final result?
It almost looks semi-professional!
The video below shows how it moves.
"My wife says she doesn't know who I am any more!"
ReplyDeleteHo ho ho! Welcome to my world!
This is a marvellous creation! Well done. I wish I was allowed to have a go and had time. Looking forward to the next one.
Kevin
Puzzlemad