Puzzles turned on a lathe were all the rage in the Victorian era and featured delicate hand chased threads. The skill and precision of this art form can still be seen in the handiwork of modern day craftsmen.
There are a few well known makers who have eggcelled at [making eggs] but none are quite so prolific as Australian dentist Stephen Chin, who has made, shall we say, an eggcess of egg puzzles over the years.
Whenever I am visiting a destination where there is a lighthouse, I find a way to fit that into the journey and see it with my own eyes. So here we are again taking a little tour, or detour, to another.
The image of an arrow through an apple, or any other manner of small object, is ubiquitous now and can be found everywhere – like here, in this wonderful puzzle box by Japanese master craftsman Akio Kamei.
Last summer I spent a puzzling “sabbatical” teaching classes at the University of Berkeley. The course didn’t take place in sunny California, however; rather, it was located in the English Midlands county of Leicestershire, where master turner John Berkeley resides.
The Hydrant was Austrian puzzle designer Stephan Baumegger’s sensational entry in the 2018 International Puzzle Design Competition, where it garnered him a top ten vote award.
Of course everyone responds to a pandemic in their own way. If you happen to be an Australian dentist with lots of drills and no teeth in sight, you start dreaming about a virus puzzle.
The “puzzle ball” is certainly one of the oldest known examples of a puzzling object. These ivory spheres were hand carved, with freely moving inner spheres nesting one inside the other.
“Lighthouses are endlessly suggestive signifiers of both human isolation and our ultimate connectedness to each other” - Virginia Woolf
“The cannon will not suffer any other sound to be heard for miles and for years around it.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Treen Castle is not a castle, it’s a jagged rocky promontory of cliffs that sit on the edge of Cornwall, England in the town of Treen.
Small wooden household and domestic objects were referred to as “treen” in the nineteenth century and earlier, a word derived literally from “of a tree”.
We’re taking a sabbatical abroad this summer at Boxes and Booze to visit England and shine the spotlight on a very special wood turner named John Berkeley.
Let’s start simply, by mentioning the fact that the talented Dr. Stephen Chin, diabolical dentist by day and wily woodturner by weekend, is rather fond of making puzzle eggs.
Stephen likes to take complex interlocking polyhedral objects, such as the humble cube, and “turn” them into practically impossible objects by spinning them on his lathe to create spheres, footballs, apples, and in this particular case, bombs.
Sometimes, it’s rather useful to have a genie lamp handy. It may not actually produce any genies, or grant wishes, but you never know. Stephen Chin, the master of the lathe, worked some impressive magic with his “Ze Genie Bottle”, which he produced for the 2017 International Puzzle Party.
I’m turning upside down with this post as well and channeling my friendly dentist from down under, that madman of mechanical mischief, the Leonardo with a lathe, puzzle maker Stephen Chin.
The West Quoddy Head Light in Lubec, Maine served as the real world inspiration for the Stickman No. 20 Puzzlebox, a detailed reproduction rendered in purpleheart, maple, walnut and padauk woods and imbued with Robert Yarger’s own flair and imagination.
Stephen Chin, the madman wood turner well known for making tippy tops, whistles, eggs and spheres out of beautiful wood has set his considerable talent to fine writing implements as well.
This time the fruits of his labor have yielded an orange, complete with a silver stem. It’s a lovely piece of art and would be perfectly satisfying as an exceptionally skillful bit of wood turning, complete with textured skin.
In the 1930’s, Columbia University physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi set out to determine the nuclear spin and associated magnetic moment of atoms in his molecular beam laboratory.
MRI puzzle by Benjamin Heidt