Half-Hour - Stewart Coffin Designs #29 by John Devost

I recently decided to make a couple of copies of this classic design by Stewart, and I’m offering up the spare copy. It’s not a fully interlocking cube so I also made a Box with Lid to pack the pieces in.

Here’s  Stewart’s description:

“As the reader can probably tell, I sometimes run out of names faster than ideas. Some solve this easy looking puzzle quickly and are apt to question the name, but others take a lot longer and question it for the opposite reason. The simple fitting together of puzzle pieces made of cubic blocks joined together different ways has 

enjoyed a universal appeal all down through the ages. I well remember the first such puzzle that I made. It was a six-piece dissection of the 3x3x3 cube shown in Mathematical Snapshots and known as Mikusiński’s Cube after its Polish 

mathematician inventor. In my teens I crudely fashioned one of scrap lumber to satisfy my curiosity of the stated two solutions. Thirty years later I decided to seek an improved design with the same features but only one solution. 

Result: the Half-Hour puzzle. 

For a 3x3x3 cubic dissection, there is an optimum number of pieces. If one were to plot a graph of difficulty vs. number of pieces, it would start out at zero with one solid cube, ascend into a playful arc, and return back to near zero with 27 cubic blocks. Here the optimum number of pieces is six. One would prefer that they all be dissimilar and non-symmetrical, and of course with only one solution. But not all that is 

possible so one must accept compromise. The Half-Hour puzzle is my best effort. It has only one solution. It was the culmination of quite an exhaustive investigation into the near countless number of possible designs.”

Pieces are Jatoba with a Box & Lid that was made from Canarywood.  Sleeve is Maple and Wenge Inlays.  Everything is ‘triple buffed’ even the interior of the box.

Shipping to be determined at close of auction.

Payment via PayPal or Wise, I also accept E-Transfers within Canada.