Birthday Puzzling

As some of you know, I celebrated my birthday last week, and the day came with some shiny new puzzles and tools thanks to my family.

Some Zebra Wood to make puzzles, and a few new tools

Some Zebra Wood to make puzzles, and a few new tools

It seems that my fiancée had been hard at work, talking to a few of my friends and figuring out what and how to get me a few puzzles and tools. Not only was I lucky enough to receive three puzzles from Mr Puzzle, but there were also some tools to help in making more puzzles myself, and three board feet of Zebra Wood to make into puzzles as well.

I have been talking about getting a small random orbit sander for quite a while now. Believe it or not, up to this point, all the sanding that Ive done, regardless of the size of the project has all been done by hand. So to get a nice palm sander plus several different grits of paper was really nice. I have a couple of biggish projects that I’m working on just now, including the charity build of two children’s rocking horses, so that will come in really handy there, as well as finishing the outer surfaces on some of the puzzles I’ve been making.

Also among the tools was a nice hand plane. It’s another tool that I didn’t own and will make a nice addition to my tools. I have a very small plane for fine work, but this will help for some of the bigger projects that I have planned. Finally there’s an interesting corner clamp. I have no doubt this will come in very handy for making boxes for some of the puzzles.

Three puzzles from Mr Puzzle

Three puzzles from Mr Puzzle

From the puzzle side, I had mentioned to my fiancée that I really wanted to have a proper go at Mr. Puzzle’s IPP exchange puzzle from IPP 31 this year, the Houdini’s Torture Cell. Well it seems that when she went looking for it, she decided it wasn’t very expensive, and had a look around some of the other puzzles on the site to pick up a few puzzles for me. In the end she decided on the Cable Car from the San Francisco IPP, and One Four All & All Four One from IPP30 designed by Arcady Dyskin & Pantazis Houlis.

I’ll be writing full reviews of all the puzzles once I’ve had a chance to play with them all so keep an eye out for them soon.

3 thoughts on “Birthday Puzzling

  1. Kevin

    I agree with Oli! Houdini’s torture cell is pretty easy – I solved it in just 3 minutes and everyone I have given it to has worked it out within half an hour. Absolutely everyone loves it!

    Glad you had a good birthday.

    Reply
  2. Pingback: Houdini’s Torture Cell « Neil's Puzzle Building Blog

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