Hello Puzzlers,

Today I am introducing a new puzzle, the Fracture-10:



Fracture-10 is a ten sided vertex turning puzzle. It has five turning axes, located around the puzzle's equator. The tips can be turned in 90 degree increments, but due to the asymmetrical edge pieces, bandaging occurs unless all edges around a vertex are oriented towards that vertex. If this is the case, the vertex can be turned 90 degrees without bandaging.

Here are a couple pictures of the puzzle partially scrambled:



Fracture-10 is very tricky to solve once scrambled due to the bandaging that occurs. However, the patterns that the puzzle makes can be quite striking thanks to the sharp angles and the asymmetrical nature of the edge pieces.

Watch the video to see the puzzle in action.

I hope you enjoy!
Dave

Very interesting.
I like this and the Ice-9 puzzle.

Nice, but look confusing .

At first I thought this is made from a Square-1 but then I realized it is made from ...
nothing.
Amazing!

Awesome! I love this puzzle. Does this puzzle jumble? Or is it just bandaged?

I instantly though Ice-9 and I WAS RIGHT

You're epic at intentionnal jumbling!!

- Greg

Wow! this is really cool.

I saw the title, and, thinking of the Danger Cube, thought,"You broke ten bones during the making of this puzzle?!?!"

Nice puzzle, by the way. I wonder if it could work with different shapes.

I love it! Very symmetrical, yet unsymmetrical.

I love the way this puzzle looks! It seems deceivingly symmetrical, but upon closer inspection that this is clearly not the case. Very good puzzle.

Reminds me a bit of Constellation Six with the turning style, but a bit more bandaged.
Can't wait to see more of your work! And to think that all of this was made years and years ago...

wow, excelent puzzle!

Incredible. I really love it.
Ice-9 and Fracture-10. Now we want see '_ _ _ _-11'
Wonderful work!

-JEC-

Wow!!! Another great idea! I love it. Do you plan on setting up a shapeways shop or talking to Mefferts? Actually you should do both. Both this and Ice-9 are very original ideas that don't appear to have a ton of parts and I would think suitable for mass production and even be reasonably priced on Shapeways.

Eager to see what's next,
Carl

Thank you for all of the great feedback!

Just to clarify one thing, this puzzle is not as old as Ice-9. In fact, I had developed the geometry in late 2007, and ran the parts on an FDM machine a couple years ago, but never made them into a finished puzzle until this year. So Fracture-10 is new to the world for 2011.

I am working on a Shapeways version of the Ice-9 puzzle, and after that is done I will begin work on Fracture-10. Of course, if any manufacturers are interested in producing either puzzle, please send me a message and I'll be happy to help design the production parts!

Dave

It seems like this puzzle is quite bandaged so you wouldn't be able to scramble it much using the 90 degree turns. How much have you tried scrambling + solving?

We talked about this puzzle a bit in Timur's Constellation 6 thread. Here's a rendering I did if you tried to unbandage it more.

is it a skewb core?

I have worked with the puzzle enough to find that it does scramble quite thoroughly, and it is not an easy solve. This was a surprise to me too. Much of the reason I hadn't finished making the puzzle despite having made the component parts was that I was not convinced that the geometry would make for a good puzzle. Oops!


The same slice pattern can work with a 12-sided dipyramid. In fact this shape has the interesting property of the edge pieces having the same length short sides as the middle pieces. However, the two six-sided vertexes of the shape become very long, and the tips that you'd twist to solve become shallower. Ultimately I thought the ten-sided shape was more appealing as a puzzle.



No, Fracture-10 uses a unique (although simple) mechanism. It is a five-armed spoke system on a central hub.

Well done, my friend! Kudos on your fine puzzle. I kinda like the aesthetics of the six-sided version myself (reminds me of quartz crystals). The Fracture-10 almost seems as though inspiration was taken from Shim's Constellation Six puzzle. Only caveat is that the pentagonal dipyramid doesn't translate as nicely to fudged geometry. Even your Ice-9 puzzle somewhat resembles a master version of the Constellation six, in that it has two layers on each of three axes. I can't believe I overlooked the entire thread, although I must say it was sad that you sat on your invention for so many years. I did not even know that 3D-printing existed then. It must have been prohibitively expensive!

Your Fracture-10 puzzle sort of reminds me of a bicube; great that you thought outside the box and convert a seemingly impossible jumbled mess into a puzzle by bandaging it.

What would the puzzle look like when shape modded into a pentagonal prism? Anything remotely like Jason's Versatile Prism?

Oskar

The resulting shape is close, but much more bandaged. Here's an image:

The corners of this shape are the mid-face pieces on Fracture-10. The same edge piece orientation on Fracture-10 that allows 90 degree turns would need to be used here as well. Also, this would not be able to turn on the horizontal slices because they would always be bandaged (even if the mechanism was changed to otherwise allow turns).