metal puzzles

My kid brought this box of three-dimensional puzzles to my house from their dad’s. Such a weird company name. What the hell does it mean. And why it has Egyptian-looking artwork on the front I have no idea. There’s almost no information on the box, nothing about where it’s made or who designed anything- just says Brain Teaser Puzzle on one side and Quantity 30 pcs on the other. So I suspect maybe it is a knock-off brand of a better product.

It has twenty-four metal puzzles- those kinds that are like twisted nails with a small gap somewhere you have to align perfectly to slide them apart, plus six wooden puzzles in the shapes of a sphere, cube, and then these other geometric things with pieces sticking out at regular intervals. I’ve actually done a few of these before. My parents have a set of “tavern puzzles”- some the exact same shape as these little metal twisters, just much larger. I even remember how to do a few of them. And the wooden sphere looks just like a three-dimensional puzzle I once solved at my brother-in-law’s house, though I don’t know if this one is put together in the same way.

The metal puzzles are in three packages of eight. So here’s the first set I solved. On the left shows them as-is, you’re supposed to separate the pieces- as shown on right: ta-da! These first four were fairly simple, if you know the basic principle of how these things come apart, it was easy to do even on the first try. And put back together again, of course. The one on the bottom is called “yin/yang” on another site, I don’t know what the rest of these are called, if they have names.

These other four from the set took more work, several sittings of fiddling to figure them out, and more than one step to solve. So I kind of show the middle step. The hardest ones for me were the two on the bottom. The second-to-last I carried around in my pocket for over a week, really stumped on how to get the hook off the last loop. And then when I finally did, had to replace and repeat over and over to be sure I wouldn’t forget it.

The last, the ring on a spring, actually did stump me. Makers should have welded the ends of the coil together, because I forced it off that way and then could not get it back on. That’s not how you’re supposed to do it. I got so frustrated with this one I used the cheat sheet. Which is nearly useless, by the way. It’s printed very small, so the directional arrows showing how to turn things are barely visible (I would need a magifier) and even then, they don’t clearly indicate what to do.

So I cheated on the last one, and if you look too closely at my middle step here (showing the proper way to do it), you can cheat too. But it’s my least favorite, not nearly so fun to fidget with as the others.