Cast Spiral

And here's yet another great looking puzzle from Hanayama; the Cast Spiral:

Hanayama have made quite a few puzzles over the years, and I haven't even scratched the surface when it comes to collecting them, so at the moment I tend to be buying ones that look nice. Sure you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but in this case I found a puzzle that both looks good and is a great puzzle to boot.

Now I should mention that this is another one of those puzzles that looks easy but really isn't. The puzzle is made up of five similar looking pieces which are made in true Hanayama style out of solid metal which has been nicely chrome finished. I say the pieces look 'similar' because although they all look the same the dovetails that join piece to piece are cut at different angles, so not every piece will fit into another, and some pieces may slide apart in one direction but not in the other.
I expected it to fall apart as soon as I got it out of the packet, but believe it or not it actually takes a lot of thinking to get it apart. And if you didn't pay close attention when it came apart it will also likely take you a while to find the correct combination to get it back together again. I reckon this took me a couple of hours to solve, but I did fully disassemble it and mix up the pieces.


This is another puzzle that I had bought for me by my very understanding other half, and I believe that it also came from Puzzle This. It is also available from Puzzle Master.