Painful - Yavuz Demirhan by Brian Menold

Painful - Yavuz Demirhan by Brian Menold

This beautiful puzzle is a very early example of Brian’s craftsmanship and if your a fan of his work you don’t want to pass on it!

Here’s a lengthy description from Kevin:

“This gorgeous piece from Brian Menold - he has recently become a full time professional puzzle maker and is gradually expanding his repertoire and using more and more beautiful woods. The quality of his work is now up with the very best and I chose just one from him this time. I had to make do with only the one for purely financial reasons - I would have bought several had I been able (yes they are THAT good). Yavuz Demirrhan is one of the most prolific puzzle designers in the world now (with 388 designs on Ishino's site). He is a good friend who specialises in interlocking puzzles with very unusual shapes and solution sequences. I adore the burr puzzles that are being designed by Alfons Eyckmans and Stephan Baumegger but Yavuz' designs are really different - he tends not to go for the really high level solution - the aim is to make something interesting. I have quite a few of his puzzles now and I have never been disappointed. It was tough to actually settle on just one but out of them all this had the nicest combination of woods and interesting shape with medium difficulty level.

This is a BIG puzzle at 3" x 3.75" x 3.75" and is made of a Canarywood split frame and the two burr pieces are Redheart. It has been finished perfectly and positively gleams in the light. Mrs S immediately exclaimed how beautiful it was and said that it could stay on display in the living room. 

So why might it be called painful? I was wondering that myself - the level is not particularly high at 14.5.3 and there are not lots of pieces to confuse you. The description on Brian's page simply says to

weave the 2 burr pieces through the 2 piece frame.

My initial exploration quickly found a dead end and then found the obvious correct pathway. More small dead ends revealed themselves but never particularly deep and so I carried on about 8 moves to this point.

 At this point it really looks pretty precarious and that the protruding burr piece should just fall out. I got stuck here - I could not for the life of me work out what to do next - it sat and taunted me for a couple of days. I kept backtracking in the hope of spotting another pathway but always ended up here. After a couple of days, I was forced to try and be logical (not a natural phenomenon for me!) and I peered hard inside to see what was stopping the moves and suddenly I realised I had been focussing on the wrong piece completely. I worked out what the next move should be in my head and tried to put it into action and at this point I realised just how good Brian's workmanship had been. The required movement was only possible with EXACT perfect alignment of the required pieces - the fit was spot on to a tiny fraction of a mm!

Having managed that special move, I still and quite a lot of weaving of pieces in and out before the first piece came free - much to my surprise, the piece that actually was released first was not what I expected! Even releasing the next piece took a good bit of fiddling about. I love it! It will stay on display and be played with regularly - Thanks Brian and Yavuz!”

Shipping cost to be determined at close of auction.