David Gear Rhombic Dodecahedron
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The David Gear Rhombic Dodecahedron is designed by applying the idea of the David Gear Cube (or Polo Gear Cube) to a rhombic dodecahedron. Now the puzzle is a rhombic dodecahedral skewb with gears on every corner and face centres. The 4-way corner gears and 3-way corner gears are independent gears that both interact with the face-centre gears. The gears of this puzzle are generated by Liobel’s Onshape tool 3D gear generator. The gear ratio is 16:16:9, which means unfortunately the shape-preserving property of the original David Gear cube no longer holds. However, the inventor has through all possible combinations with teeth numbers less or equal than 24 and no ideal candidate appears. There are 26 gears turning at the same time, with 12 of them breaking into four parts. The inventor added magnets to the skewb part to help positioning. As we know, the skewb + edge-turning cube axis system has 2 special jumbling moves (see Rhomdo Transformer, Curvy Copter Skewb and Coin Transformer). On the David Gear Rhombic Dodecahedron, since all circles turn synchronously, neither of these two jumbling moves are possible. However, the first type (gear turn followed by a skewb turn) would appear if more cuts are added to the face center gears. The second type (60-degree skewb turn followed by a gear turn) is trickier since the 3-tooth face gear is ~70.53 degrees now, in stead of the perfect 67.5 degrees, which means that after a 60-degree skewb turn, the teeth on those affected face center gears are no longer equally distributed. On the current puzzle, it is possible to start a gear turn in the latter case, but it will be blocked very soon (see picture). The puzzle is SLA-printed. Links
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