Five-Piece Solid Block - Assembly puzzle by Stewart Coffin (STC #78-C) by asiegel

Last crawled date: 4 years, 1 month ago

Five-Piece Solid Block
Assembly puzzle by Stewart Coffin (STC #78-C)
Assemble the five pieces into a 3x3x3 cube.
Five-Piece Solid Block is among Coffin's more obscure 3x3x3 cube assembly puzzles. It can be viewed as intermediate between Half-Hour (which has six pieces) and Coffin's Quartet (which has four), and it is surely the least well-known of the three.
Coffin made several attempts to find a five-piece interlocking 3x3x3 cube, and Five-Piece Solid Block is his best effort. Whereas Coffin's Quartet is fully (indeed serially) interlocking, and Half-Hour does not interlock at all, Five-Piece Solid Block, in Coffin's words, "is not quite interlocking but nearly so."
This design will likely be of interest primarily to Coffin completists or those who are interested in his explorations of interlocking 3x3x3 cubes. If you're new to Coffin's designs, I'd recommend Half-Hour or Coffin's Quartet instead (or see the Printable Puzzle Project section, below, for links to many other recommendations).
Printing Instructions
Print one copy of coffin.five-piece-solid-block.pieces.stl. That's it (this is an extremely easy print)! You may optionally print coffin.five-piece-solid-block.box.stl, a display box that can hold the assembled puzzle in place, as shown in the cover photo.
I've also included a smaller version, coffin.five-piece-solid-block.pieces-smaller.stl, that uses around 1/3 less material.
The Printable Puzzle Project
The Printable Puzzle Project aims to make available high-quality open-source models of many puzzle designs. All of our models are posted with the generous permission of their designers and are licensed for non-commercial use only. Anyone may print copies for their own personal use, but selling or otherwise monetizing them is not permitted, and puzzle designers retain all rights as copyright holders of their work.
Our puzzles are modeled using the open-source puzzlecad library. The .scad file is included with this model in case you want to modify any of its design parameters; more information on how to do this can be found in the PPP Puzzle Modeling tutorial.
About the Designer
Stewart Coffin has been called "the most outstanding designer and maker of interlocking puzzles that the world has ever seen". He is credited with over four hundred designs, has pioneered numerous ingenious puzzle forms, and has written extensively about puzzle design and craftsmanship. More information on Coffin, along with many other printable models of his designs, can be found on the Stewart Coffin Puzzles overview page.
Happy puzzling!