Hi!

I wanted to try this puzzle ever since I have made the Constellation Six.
The point was to get regular pentagons instead of circles in the face centers.
This was only possible by changing the angle between axes from 120° to 130.42°.

As a cost, the puzzle has lost its rotational symmetry and one working axis.
So, here's the Biaxe ([bi-'aks]) - a challenging puzzle with only 2 possible moves.

I don't know whether it is easier than Constellation Six, maybe the difficulty is pretty much the same.

Because there are 2 moves, a binary code notation may be used for scramling and solving: 00111000100101010100010

YouTube Video

Another great puzzle that should be mass produce , look very nice.

Interesting that a puzzle which allows so few moves can be so complex.

Very interesting puzzle. I also think that having two moves and being complex to solve isn't that much of a stretch considering puzzles like the hungarian rings, and arusloky (albeit, neither are too hard).

That is unbelievably cool. I really hope I can buy one of these shortly.

Would it have been possible to make the other axis turn in steps of 180 degrees? It appears as if it could.

The regular pentagons proove that this is no fudged puzzles.
But there are cuts between pieces that can't be used by a direct move.

Very strange...
and cool.

NICE!!! I really like this one.
There are now several puzzles out there with this type of cut. We've been calling them "Stored Cuts". Here is a search which turns up a few of them.
http://twistypuzzles.com/forum/search.php?keywords=%22stored+cuts%22

Carl

This is definitely a more difficult puzzle than the Constellation Six, which was already a very difficult puzzle to begin with.

What would the dual of this shape look like? I'm curious if that would give those pentagon face centers a unique orientation in the solved state.

Carl

Carl, the pentagons do, in fact, have orientation. If you rotate the left piece clockwise and then the right piece clockwise, the pentagon at the top front will be back in its original position but at a different orientation.

Agreed... I was curious if the dual of this shape would show that change in orientation. Just as the Trajber's Octahedron makes the face center orientation of a Rubik's Cube apparent.

Carl

I doubt about this, because this cutting surface is not plane - it consists of two non-parallel planes.

Do you mean that stored cuts can happen only in a fudged puzzle? Sounds like a theorem that should be proven

Well, dual shape requires definition of face centers. Where is a center in a scalene triangle? We can define the center as the pentagon's center. In this case the dual shape is some triangular prism, whose section is an isosceles triangle. And it's easy to imagine that the elements that correspond to pentagons will be corners of the prism, so they will lose their 5-order rotational symmetry and the dual puzzle will change shape.

No. That means almost every time I saw stored cuts in doctrinaire puzzle was in restricted puzzles. Examples for the other were Senior Barrel, Pentastick and Biaxe.
It gets quite interesting when you try to "unstore" the stored cuts.