There's no denying it... @CO and I are huge fans of puzzles, riddles, and escape rooms! We love how they challenge us, help us collaborate, and make us stretch our creative problem solving muscles. With this project, we used our passion to design and make a set of puzzle boxes that can be infinitely customized.
Of course, we started by modeling our idea in SOLIDWORKS for Makers. The box is a fairly traditional design, but we did experiment with a new way to achieve the highly-coveted, continuous-grain corners.
We used a 90 degree V-bit in a CNC router to cut the miters, and left just about 0.015" of wood fibers to hold the sides together.
Then we used a heat gun to bend the pieces into position.
This created a truly continuous grain result on 3 corners. (NOTE: There is a book-matching technique that approaches continuous grain on all 4 corners, but we'll cover that in a future post 😉)
The combination lock on the box is a second generation design of the one we added to our Monster Box.
This time, we moved the controls to the front of the box and made 100% of the mehanism 3D Printable. It still uses the two piece dial design that has a back piece which can be indexed in any one of 8 positions. This allows for a total of 512 unique possible combinations, so you may be wondering how we consider this puzzle box 'infinitely' customizable.
The key is in the associated 3D models that help you figure out the box's combination. We modeled three differnt digital twins "cousins" that have unique aesthetics and increasingly difficult puzzles to solve. Scanning a QR code brings up each model in 3DPlay and the various commands in this viewing app help reveal the combination.
The beauty of this approach is that you can create a brand new 3D model with a new set of puzzles, and change the combination on the physical box to have a whole new experience!
We brought these to the OurNextMake booth in the Maker Zone at 3DEXPERIENCE World 2024 and attendees really loved them.
Be sure to check out this video to see how the whole project came together:
If you'd like make one of these for yourself, feel free to dowload the native SOLIDWORKS files:
...or the files in neutral STEP or STL formats
