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Lee Krasnow is a puzzle maker who makes puzzles that make the mind boggle. His passion for puzzle making runs strong and in this video he shares some of his puzzles and construction tips.
This binary puzzle takes 64 moves to get the first piece out and then 32 for the next peice, and I'm going to guess that, unless you take his shortcuts, the next pieces come out in 16, 8, 4, and 2 moves.
Lee's clutch box is a tricky box. If someone gave me the clutch box without telling me how to open it, I feel pretty confident that I could lose weeks of my life to trying to figure it out. The way that he makes his puzzles are all on a table saw that has been modded with "disposable fingers." Lee is living a maker who lives his life dedicated to the pursuit of puzzlemaking.
Click here to get the video (MP4) delivered automatically with iTunes. This video will play on PC/Mac/Linux/PSPs and iPod video devices - Link.
Big thanks goes out to Jay Fienberg, the musician, and ringtone maker and intro/outro maestro who made the new intro/outro music for this podcast.
Is there any way to get this video without bowing down to the almighty apple (downloading itunes)?
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click the mp4 link...
http://downloads.oreilly.com/make/make_faire_leepuzzle.mp4
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Sure, you can use any aggregator like fireant (http://getfireant.com) and slap in the rss feed and it will suck all the videos out and download them for you!
Here's the feed:
http://www.makezine.com/blog/index.xml
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Remember when proprietary audio/video formats were discouraged? All these podcasts make me think its the 90's again and i'm being forced to download REAL Player.
Sadly, this is the main reason I never resubscribed. Too many 'cool features' are in these formats. Not everyone wants an ipod or itunes.
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Thanks for pointing out that MP4 link, still needed me to install quicktime, but thats much better than installing iTunes. Does anyone know of a decent app to convert these to a standard AVI or MPEG1/2 format?
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I thought I'd post another cool puzzle maker here:
http://www.maxton.com/max5.html
BTW, what's up with having to log into O'Reilly for leaving comments, when I'm already logged in with Make for the forum...seems kludgy...
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I watched the video and visited both Lee's site and Maxton's. These puzzles are really cool but I wish they would find a way to have some of their creations mass produced so that they would be cheaper. A $1000 is a little steep for me.
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A Google search for QuickTime Alternative will yield the way to play QuickTime files without iTunes, but it is a little shady as shown here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_Alternative
I personally like iTunes and iPod and Apple in general, so I don't use this but others here do and say it's slick.
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vlan plays mp4s, i used it for everything...
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Yep, I'd sure like to see some of my designs in more affordable mass produced versions as well... the most prohibitive factors in implementing this pertain not only to the huge setup cost of establishing the production processes, but also to the difficulty of convincing retail outlets to stock a new product line on thier shelves.
I've looked into the feasibility of setting up various mid to high volume production lines, and basically the only way that I could ever see this realistically happening is if there is significant enough public interest (i.e. economic demand) to convince an established distribution company that it's worth their time and money to sell mass produced versions of these puzzles to the retail outlets which they supply merchandise to. Once a distributor gets on board, then the rest apparently falls into place easily enough. This is what I've been told by numerous people in the industry.
So... if you want to see this happen, then I think the best way that you can help is by publicly expressing your interest in these puzzles (i.e. post a comment here) and maybe a distributor will take notice. That's just my $0.02 worth though... ;-)
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Yeah I just watched the video too, this guy is a bit too nuclear for me. I'd feel pretty dumb with one of those magic boxes. I like the idea of designing custom puzzles though. I found a good site for making jigsaw puzzles..
http://www.calyptic.com/
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Where did Lee get those toggle clamps from? I could use a set of those on my CNC machine!
Awesome puzzles....I'd really like to have one of those clutch boxes.
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http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&rh=n%3A553170&page=1
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