In a previous post I mentioned how I started a few Square-2s back in the early to mid-1990s right after the Square-1 was in stores. Two I capped and the third languished as a roughly cut and uncapped mess.

After finding this forum in late 2006 I cleaned one up, and then last year cleaned up and restickered another.

Finally, a year after the second cleanup and 15 years after I started it, I finally finished capping and stickering my third Square-2. It is pretty identical to the one I restickered last year, but I took some good pictures of it so I thought I would post. This has the same stickers (from of Hidetoshi, thanks!) as my last.

So I think it is clear I take too long building Square-2s






Dave

Beautiful!

Best Square-2 ever

Beautiful build! Very clean.

I've been working on one of these the past few weeks as well. I have been cutting the caps and I have a question about this. Do you attach the caps, then follow up with some apoxie filler, or just cap and be done?

flawless build, looks amazing. I wish that I was that good

flambore wrote:Beautiful build! Very clean.

The pictures hide the small flaws. It is far from perfect, but I think it turned out OK. Good stickering can get you 90% of the way to a great TwistyPuzzle picture. I'll prove that one of these days but this isn't a bad example.

As this was one of my first mods (when I started it) many of the cuts are less than perfect. On one piece I even started a cut then stopped and moved over 1mm for the final cut. You can still see the the cut right next to the sticker if you know where to look. A proper build would involve filling this with putty but I knew this wasn't for sale (I have to keep one of my work, after all) so I could let that slide.

flambore wrote:I've been working on one of these the past few weeks as well. I have been cutting the caps and I have a question about this. Do you attach the caps, then follow up with some apoxie filler, or just cap and be done?

I glue the caps and then just finish from there. I cut the caps intentionally too large so I can file down. I actually didn't use any sandpaper for this mod, just a file and a sharp knife to scrape a few places. If I get the piece filed nice and flat (I rub it against a large flat file) I get a nice fusion of the piece and cap and can sand it down to a nice rounded edge. On occasion I messed up on this one and the edges were a bit rounded meaning there is still a small gap between the plate and piece at the outside of the piece.

This was one of the first that I cut a long time ago so it was pretty rough (I didn't know much of anything about puzzle modification, and was practicing) and required a bit of filing to flatten out. Since my plastic for capping is thin, this meant the final result is a bit less than square, or it is a bit loose. Not a big deal, but if I were to start over I would be much more careful to measure exactly two widths of capping plastic and cut within that and sand down to just that line.

The final touch was a Sharpie on the edges which worked well on my Kilominx. It covers up the lighter coloring of the glue when it shows. Everyone seems to love painting their puzzles, but it seems like so much work! Since only the non-stickered 1.5mm edge of each piece shows a Sharpie can be your friend

Dave

Good stickering can get you 90% of the way to a great TwistyPuzzle picture.

Lol, nice stickering.

DLitwin - thanks for your reply and detailed explanation. That was helpful. I was hoping to avoid extra filling and sanding on this one as well. My first one was filled with poly resin. I did a really poor job at cutting the pieces (used a dremel), and made the cuts too thick, hence making big gaps between the pieces. This time I used a razor saw, and the cuts are much nicer. Still not done with the caps, but I'm working on it.

Did you do anything special with the stickers? I mean, for the corners, did you do anything more than cut the sticker in half?

Are the stickers a little bit tiled?

Looks great! Nice job, even if it did take 15 years.

flambore wrote:Did you do anything special with the stickers? I mean, for the corners, did you do anything more than cut the sticker in half?

On all three I left the existing stickers on, and boy did they look worn.

When I cleaned up my first I used CubeSmith Square-1 stickers. I cut the corner sticker on the backing paper, cutting two parallel lines 1 or 1.5mm away from the center line. I just used an XActo knife and a ruler (metal!). I used the knife to cut the sharp corners that resulted to round them.

My post about this here (good pictures and info) led me to meet Hidetoshi, who was kind enough to send me two sets of the custom stickers he printed for Mr. Noda when he built a Square-2.

So I hand drew the Square-2 logo on my first finished Square-2 and the other two have used Hidetoshi's stickers.

Alokin: The stickers are not tiled, but the yellow stickers with the logo are a bit thicker as they are kind of adhesive backed photo paper. One corner stuck to the surrounding backing paper when I was clumsy and so you can see a bit of a L shaped bump on that one (upper right on the Logo face). The others are stanard vinyl, although the blue has a very subtle purple/metalic sheen to them in a strong light source.

Dave

Looks so good. I really want to redo my mine white one. <<3

This puzzle cant be any better then this!

Super! Alex