This is Hexie, my cheese based puzzle:





It is a hexagonal variant of the sought-after Rubik's Cheese puzzle. The puzzle has a White Strong & Flexible material mechanism, and a Full Colour Sandstone shell.
It's quite small, it stands only 3cm high. The mechanism is quite similar to the one found in regular cheeses. Movement is perfect, but it's pretty easy to solve.
It's nothing big, just a fun little project. A video will follow once I finally get my hands on that new webcam...

I originally designed the colour shell with 1.9mm walls. Shapeways rejected to print it as it would be too fragile. I was fairly confident that it would work so I did it myself.
3 of the parts came out just fine, but I broke the other three in post processing. Nothing too major, I just glued them back together. It just distracts a bit from the overall look (faults carefully hidden in the photos).
It's worth noting that the cyan printhead was blocked so the shades with blue in them came out a bit weird (you can see parts where the powder wasn't bonded together due to the malfunction), and the parts with blue in them are the ones that broke.

©Tom van der Zanden 2010

Rainbow color themes are some of my favourite.
Very sparkling design overall!




Pantazis

Very nice design, it's always nice to see something nice and simple.

Oooh.... pretty.... Must.... Have... lol

Nice job =)

What a great idea for a nice little puzzle. I really like the gradients. Is this done with a z-corp machine?

Skarabajo.

So simple and cute, and also very effective!

The outside of the puzzle was made on a ZPrinter, but the mechanism was made with SLS because the ZCorp material does not have the right properties for building puzzles.

What an innovative concept! Nicely done Tom!
I thought you had them printed in white and did some sort of tie dye thing to them!

i like with stickers more but, it's still great y'know!

Nice. Looks great.

Alex

Very nice, the colors are fantastic.

Very cool! 3D Printing just keeps getting better!

The gradient effect makes me wish for twisty puzzles that take the shapes of color solids.

Wow! That's interesting... What about a color solid black hole puzzle? Shouldn't be too hard, just some cubes in a clear box.