Cuboctahedron Puzzle, Cube Puzzle

Last crawled date: 4 years, 3 months ago

Cuboctahedron Puzzle, Cube Puzzle
Update: A kid told me that if printed with rainbow-colored filament, the puzzle does not need stickers because one could just solve for the colors!
A cuboctahedron is a polyhedron with 8 triangular face and 6 square faces. It can be constructed from a cube by slicing off the 8 corners (tetrahedra) using its edge midpoints for the slicing plane. Well, it makes a nice Rubik-style puzzle if we further slice the l cuboctahedron using planes that would have dissected the cube into five tetrahera (see my other design: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3937863).
Based on a 50mm^3 cube, I have designed a cuboctahedron puzzle that can be printed all-in-one or, if preferred, in five pieces.
Method 1: Print 1 center and 4 corners and then snap them together. Add some stickers or paint the faces for a real puzzle.
Method 2: Print the all-in-on version, with or without letters at a resolution less than 0.2mm. Then, use a 3D spatula (about 0.2mm) to loosen the 4 corners. Be careful and always wear protective gloves!
Have fun and read about the cuboctahedron at the Wikipedia entry in the References.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuboctahedron
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3937863