These last days I've been thinking about a possible hybrid puzzle. I've tried to turn into a design but unfortunately my designing skills aren'tgood enaough (by far).

So I decided to post my idea on this forum, so feel free to work this out if you feel like to.

The idea is the following: combine a Rex Cube and a Dino Cube. Even though it may seem redundant as they are both corner turning cubes, the final result would look something like this:




This is not a final working design, just an idea of how it would look from the outside.

As I said if you want you can try to design that, if nobody feels like doing it I hope one day in the future my skills will be good enough to design it by myself.

Thanks.

So far you only have made the outside appearance? If you have a mech picture that would be cool to see.

The rex cube is a master skewb with the pieces a little bit curvy and the corners hidden.
This is a elite skewb with the pieces a little bit curvy and the corners hidden.

-Doug

I suppose you would have to move each layer independently, or else it's just a rex cube. But even the rex cube cannot have the middle-ish layer turning by itself, so this would actually be one step further from the rex cube. It looks really cool, by the way!

What do you mean? The rex cube has a middle layer (slice) that can turn by itself...

-Doug

Sorry, that wasn't the best explanation. I was not talking about the real middle layer, but the thin triangles and small square pieces. In picture 2 the puzzle is just turning like a rex cube with ornamental lines. The new "master" cuts are not used.

That's true!

I should have added another picture like this so that the whole thing could be more understandable:


BTW any ideas on how this could be designed? Or any clues on the internal mechanism?

I don think there is anything fundamentally hard about designing this puzzle. A standard shells mech buildup would do.

The issue is those pieces are too thin. Even minor filleting would shrink them a lot. The design seems easy in principal but the puzzle wouldn't work in practice.

BTW, this puzzle is a Dino Cube + Rex Cube.

Rex cubes have been made with much thicker pieces so I don't think thickness is necessarily a limitation. Just give the spherical cuts smaller radii.

Yes, that's what I said in my first post.





I'm guessing there is no way to make the curved cuts deeper, so is there any other way to make those tiny pieces bigger?

Thanks for the help!

Sure there is:

I still don't think those long thin pieces will work well or look good after filleting.

No offense to you(JFonS) but I love this one a whole lot better because the pieces are more or less the same area/size.

No offence taken! The first design was this way because I don't know how to do it another way.


Ok, but let's pretend there's no problem with the long thin pieces (even though we all know there is). How would the whole thing work. I read a couple of things about shelling in twisty-puzzles design but I'm not quite sure how this works and how it would be applied in this particular puzzle.

I know I'm a complete newby but I really appreciate the help!

Not exactly the design you discuss but at least the slice layers are equal.
And it deserves to be remembered:
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