Rhomb puzzle by drzowie

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

This is a rhombic 3x3x3 cube-assembly puzzle that is pretty fun. The pieces are different from SOMA, and the rhombic squishing adds more constraints, so I believe there is only one way to assemble it (though six different orientations of the assembled cube). It's a clone of a plastic puzzle that has been in our family for decades. The puzzle was chewed at some point by a puppy, and was neither fully usable nor pretty -- but we kept it around nonetheless.
Recently I learned to use TinkerCAD and cloned the puzzle as an exercise in design. TinkerCAD was an interesting challenge because it required oblique rotation to assemble the rhombic building-block. Some analytic geometry was required to calculate how to twist the built-in block object sideways so that squishing would yield the correct dihedral skew. The angles aren't perfect because I couldn't figure how to rotate an object by a fraction of a degree -- but it is at least as good as the original molded puzzle, and fits together satisfyingly.
For best results, print the shell and puzzle pieces separately in contrasting colors. The shell has a cutout in the rear to that it can be stood "on its corner", highlighting the three-fold symmetry of the squashed cubies. The pieces can (and should) be printed with no supports, but the shell needs supports because of the cutout.