Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
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Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
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Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#2That's very cool, and a beautiful piece in the end. Good choice to do it in 303. 316 really is a pain.
The ingenuity required to get things like this one on manual tools (especially pre-DRO, but even now) is amazing. Starting out machining, I expected the machining to be the hard part, but often a lot more time is spent on planning, fixturing, set-up, and so on. For example, the idea of making custom vise jaws to hold odd-shaped parts seemed crazy to me the first time I heard it, and now its just a completely normal way to behave. CNC makes things a whole lot easier, from being able to do complex shapes with CAD/CAM, to simple things like interpolated circles (when the mill cuts a circular shape by moving X and Y simultaneously, a seemingly trivial thing that's nearly impossible on a manual*). Having a 4th or 5th axis makes complex stuff even easier, and often completely avoids the need for wacky fixturing.
The lathe fixturing here is especially fun. A lot of old hobby books are written assuming you have only a lathe and no mill. Fun, often scary, fixturing was the order of the day.
* Ok, you can do crazy things with boring heads, but getting it right is really hard.
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#3Very cool!
Follow up idea, which I'm sure adds tons more complexity: have each face be a different material or finish. E.g. one face is stainless, another anodized aluminum, zinc plated for a third, brass on another. Each of the edge pieces would have to be a two-part assembly, and the corners composed of the three materials joined together (joinery, screws, brazing).
That surely would feel strange with the varying densities and thermal masses while solving, but would look very cool. To be fair, it appears from the pictures that each center piece's pattern is symmetric, which avoids the difficult part of aligning those when solving (center often doesn't line up when solving a cube with pictures on the faces in place of a solid color).
Probably far too niche for selling these to be profitable, but I'd love to have one.
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#4I never realized before that the sliding surfaces inside the cube are cylindrical, not spherical.
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#5I saw a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iB7kkCy1xM&t=160s) on EDM machining and the tolerances were magnificently tight. I had since wondered if such techniques would work for building a "one-move" Lemarchand Box (Hellraiser), assuming that engraving various designs would utterly obscure the actually disjoint pieces.
I am not sure what steel you would need. Something dimensionally stable, to be sure.
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#6Very cool! Follow up idea, which I'm sure adds tons more complexity: have each face be a different material or finish. E.g. one face is stainless, another anodized aluminum, zinc plated for a third, brass on another. Each of the edge pieces would have to be a two-part assembly, and the corners composed of the three materials joined together (joinery, screws, brazing). That surely would feel strange with the varying d…
> center often doesn't line up when solving a cube with pictures on the faces in place of a solid color
I don't understand this. If you have a corner piece in the wrong corner then won't the colours on the adjacent faces be wrong?
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#7My first thought was: how the heck could you assemble a metal cube? Putting a plastic one together relies on the springiness of the material in order to place the final piece, but metal won't give in the same way. The solution:
> The face centers each receive a hollow stem that screws into the 5/16-24 thread. This assembly holds a captive spring-loaded screw, which screws into the core. The spring provides some give to the entire unit and allows the cube to be assembled and disassembled easily by snapping pieces in.
Brilliant!
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#8Very cool! Follow up idea, which I'm sure adds tons more complexity: have each face be a different material or finish. E.g. one face is stainless, another anodized aluminum, zinc plated for a third, brass on another. Each of the edge pieces would have to be a two-part assembly, and the corners composed of the three materials joined together (joinery, screws, brazing). That surely would feel strange with the varying d…
> center often doesn't line up when solving a cube with pictures on the faces in place of a solid color I don't understand this. If you have a corner piece in the wrong corner then won't the colours on the adjacent faces be wrong?
The corner and edge pieces are guaranteed to have the right orientation, but the center pieces can be in any 90° orientation. Imagine an arrow printed on a center piece; a cube can be solved and still have that arrow pointing to any of the 4 neighboring sides.
Here's a video explaining special algorithms to rotate only the center piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk1eCZNCTB4
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#9> Although it may be neat to look at, it weighs a massive three pounds (~1.4 kg) and is very tiring to manipulate. Solving this is more a test of the wrists than of the mind!
This was the punchline I was looking for. The aluminum version seem like a more desirable version at 500g.
Re: Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
> center often doesn't line up when solving a cube with pictures on the faces in place of a solid color I don't understand this. If you have a corner piece in the wrong corner then won't the colours on the adjacent faces be wrong?
The corner and edge pieces are guaranteed to have the right orientation, but the center pieces can be in any 90° orientation. Imagine an arrow printed on a center piece; a cube can be solved and still have that arrow pointing to any of the 4 neighboring sides. Here's a video explaining special algorithms to rotate only the center piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk1eCZNCTB4
Ah, interesting, thanks! So it's possible to reach a configuration where every side has the centre rotated but all the colours match up. I would not have believed that without seeing it.