Thread: Impossible puzzle

Originally Posted by Lignum

Sorry Jake I should have mentioned that boiling water was the first crucial step in my Dovie and im still debaiting with myself if i should post a pic of that outcome for you to see

no need to get nasty Ligo baby. ......de 'baiting' ......baiting alright !

No. Your right. You shouldn't give it away. (prick)

Originally Posted by Lignum

Sorry Jake I should have mentioned that boiling water was the first crucial step in my Dovie

Pondered it over a cuppa, Lig?

Originally Posted by Felder

Pondered it over a cuppa, Lig?

But poor `ol Tripper was probbably having a sleepless night, tossing and turning wondering what the hell i was doing with boiling water

Originally Posted by Lignum

But poor `ol Tripper was probbably having a sleepless night, tossing and turning wondering what the hell i was doing with boiling water

yes thats right. I spend all night....AND day thinking about that joint.

I can keep pretending I'm pulling my hair out in frustration if it makes you happy Mr Lignum.... Whats your real name anyway ? Mines Jake ! Not that I like that name. I reakon I look more like a Tom.

Ok guys, I know this is an old thread, but I have a question about it - Joe kindly gave us the answer in post 79-80.

He said it needed to be basswood (which I have checked has a very low hardness rating), or Southern Yellow Pine.

Would this trick work with Australian Cedar?
Or with Huon Pine?

Because I have a block of each of these, both roughly 300mm x 300mm x 150mm I think.

Also - is it WORTH doing this on a piece of Huon which would have to be cut up from a nice big block for the purpose?

I don't own a lathe, and therefore won't be able to use the slab as a bowl turning blank etc.

Any other locally available timbers that can perform this kind of compression? (can't seem to find basswood the right size on ebay)

Thanks Bassmansimon for re-inventing the issue. I must admit the thread was hijacked at one stage and i lost interest. I thought it would never have been answered. But thanks also to JoeGriener for his solution (no pun).
Boiling is, of course the answer and the maker's claim that it is not steamed is correct. Thanks Joe for the pictures. I think I said at one stage that this puzzle was one of the questions I wanted to answer before I left this planet. One down!

Graham

When I saw the answer I went and made one out of Radiata Pine. It worked very nicely and has a couple of the local yokels bamboozled.

Because it works on compressing the grain fibres, I imagine it'd work best on light to medium density woods. Any pine should do, as well as the lighter hardwoods. I doubt that dense timbers such as Dead Finish, Gidgee, Mulga, Ironbark etc. would be at all suitable.

Oz Cedar should work nicely. This is just my opinion, I haven't tried it, but I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to start boiling.

Huon, well... I think that'd be a waste. It will compress and is perfectly OK to make the puzzle with; I've used the same "trick" to put turned Huon Arrows through blocks of other woods. (I want to put an arrow through a glass vase/jar but keep chipping the edge of the hole when I try drilling. ) The reason I say it's a waste is 'cos the boiling removes a lot of Huon's natural oils and reduces the smell quite significantly. It also fades the colour noticeably. If it ain't that cheddar yellow and doesn't smell pretty, it's been ruined in my books.

Originally Posted by Skew ChiDAMN!!

(I want to put an arrow through a glass vase/jar but keep chipping the edge of the hole when I try drilling. ).

Skew aldi had some cheap diamond hole drills recently , about 2 " for the largest down to 3/4" for the smallest
If your doing it through glass can you heat an isolated spot and gently push a hole in the glass , Just wondering , wear glasses though

The arrow through the glass jar sounds awesome... hurry up and get it done so we can see it done. I tried a pretty lame attempt but the wood was still too thick to compress properly (probably didn't boil for long enough but ran out of time in the kitchen when SWMBO came home early)

Originally Posted by Ashore

Skew aldi had some cheap diamond hole drills recently , about 2 " for the largest down to 3/4" for the smallest
If your doing it through glass can you heat an isolated spot and gently push a hole in the glass , Just wondering , wear glasses though

I'll run down to our local and check tomorrow.

My problem has been when it breaks through. I'd use a sacrificial backer if 'twas wood, but inside a glass bottle that's just not possible.

You've got me thinking about that heating trick though... If it distorted the glass to one side to give the appearance that the arrow had actually punched through... Hmmm...

Originally Posted by corbs

The arrow through the glass jar sounds awesome... hurry up and get it done so we can see it done.

It's an old trick, but pretty effective.

Thanks for re-awakening the thread, bassmansimon, and to all for your kind assessments.

I've been considering some extensions to the process. The only hangup at the moment is securing a bottle jack that will fit within a newly-built frame for a longer compression member. The pipe clamp is awkward for what I have in mind. If necessary, I suppose I can build another frame to hold one of my existing bottle jacks, but I'll visit a couple suppliers today. The perfidy I recently discovered at YouTube (revise your address field to "t=81532") has accelerated this to near the top of my bucket list.

Wood is uniquely suited for this game, because it has different mechanical properties in all three directions. Properties, and property ratios, vary all over the lot; and my primary reference (AITC Timber Manual, very old) lists only allowable stresses. But, in general, radial compression is about one-fourth as strong/stiff as compression parallel to the grain. As I stated earlier, radial compression produces the least off-axis distortion. I've cut some radial slabs from a pine tree recently felled, and cut some test specimens to verify operations.

(BTW, I bought a large-ish plank (2x10 nominal) for a first test, but around here, such sizes are cut from the whole tree, and the piece culled from the stack for radial grain contains a central core. One candidate test specimen broke apart from simply dropping it on the floor. Gluing it back together sort of defeats the purpose of the game.)

I have another log of cedar, and a few chunks of camphor, that can provide some more specimens. Cutting into quarters, with approx 2-inch slabs radial, still leaves pieces too big for bowl blanks for my lathe without further trimming. You can do the same for any of your timbers - nothing sacred about basswood.

I don't know if Roy Underhill prowls around here, but if he does, I hope he appreciates the honour of "standing on his shoulders" to reach the stars. (My, my, ain't I the poet?!!)

Joe

so any kind of wood would work for this trick, as long as it is radial grain for best result?

"Any kind of wood" covers too much territory. Softer woods will be more amenable to compression, and some hardwoods will be almost impossible. The pieces I used earlier were ordinary framing timber, 2x4 (nominal) - actually 1.5" x 3.5" (38mm x 89mm). In the upover, such timber usually comes from plantations of trees bred for fast growth; they display widely-spaced growth rings.

In any case, the more radial the grain pattern, the less distorted is the compression. See the pictures in the earlier posts for comparison. On my monitor, the pieces in pic 5 of post #80 display at 4.5" high, so the average ring width is about 5mm, using 35/45 x whatever.

If you're buying timber, ask the merchant for permission to select a particular piece for radial grain; make this a condition of sale. If you mill a piece from a log, cut thicker than your final thickness for such selection; then if your first cut is slightly off, you can reduce one side as needed, and/or sand both sides. Incidentally, I've since sanded all four faces of the second piece to remove some leftover distortion; the same dodge can be employed to remove the vise-jaw marks for pieces made by the Roy Underhill method.

Joe

MOLE CREEK TASMANIA PUZZLE i there. I read with interest about the above puzzle. I am astounded and for the life of me cant work it out!! Can you also put me out of my misery by letting me know the answer?? Its been a few years on the go, I have asked many smart people but still come up empty handed! Unless they have "cheated"??.

Please oh please tell me!!!

Jeff