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This is The Glass puzzle box. This box takes around 120 steps to open! To do so you have to navigate a marble through a complex maze, and solve the challenging sequences of the two sets of interlocking sliders. While doing this you can see exactly how all the mechanisms work!

Description

This is The Glass puzzle box. This box takes around 120 steps to open! To do so you have to navigate a marble through a complex maze, and solve the challenging sequences of the two sets of interlocking sliders. While doing this you can see exactly how all the mechanisms work!

This box is bigger than you think. It’s 90 x 136 x 208 mm.

When I was designing the maze and the mechanism of the sliders for this puzzle box I used a program called burr tools to find the optimal configuration for the sliders. Because of this I only knew the path through the maze that the marble should take when opening the puzzle box. I didn’t know how to find my way through all the sliders. The first time opening this box took me almost two whole hours. When I opened the box for the third time while making a youtube video, it still took me 45 minutes to do so.

Because the box is made out of acrylic, you can see everything that’s going on. This gives you a deeper understanding about the mechanism, and the way puzzle boxes work. This box is perfect for people who want to understand the underlying principles for a puzzle box.

One of the biggest challenges for designing this puzzle box was making a box which can be held together with only six bolts. All the parts have to be assembled in a very specific order which still confuses and delights me at the same time. It feels like solving a puzzle.

Be warned… Although you can see everything, this box is very difficult.

The laser cut file for cutting the acrylic for this puzzle box has a square around it. This will allow you to easily scale the laser cut file for any wood thickness. I used 3 mm wood for making the puzzle box, and it resulted in a box which was approximately 95 x 136 x 208 mm.
The square around the laser cut file is 450 by 275 mm for4 mm wood. If you want to use another wood thickness, scale the laser cut file accordingly. 

 

Besides the laser cut acrylic you will need:

  • A rubber band
  • 6 nuts and bolts. The bolts need to be 90 mm long with a diameter of 6 mm. You can also use a longer bolt and cut it at the right length. 
  • a marble with a diameter of 10 mm


The laser cut files have three layers:

A layer for the outer square to scale the file (450 x 275 mm)
A layer for cutting.
A layer for line engraving.