36 piece burr

This is a puzzle of my own design. It looks a little intimidating, but it's actually not that hard to put it together.

This burr consists of 36 long pieces, three of them have notches.
The un-notched pieces are identical to the long pieces of the 24-piece burr puzzle

If you take the width of the pieces to be one "unit", then the pieces are all six units long. The long cutout in every piece is five units wide and half a unit deep. The extra notches on the three pieces are all one unit wide and either one unit from the end or exactly in the middle for the nearest piece.

I used 18 mm for the size of my basic "unit", so the puzzle ends up 108 across.

The notches in the top most three pieces allow five of the vertical pieces to be pushed down. Once the vertical pieces are pushed down, the two horizontal pieces towards the right can be slid towards each other and pulled out. Once the middle part is out the second vertical piece towards the middle can also be pushed down, allowing the left most top horizontal piece to be slid out.

With the top layer of horizontal pieces removed it's best to put the puzzle back down on the table, sliding all the vertical pieces back up.

The next layer just slides out vertically.

Once the second layer is removed, there is plenty of room to lift and slide out the next cross layer. The next layer then slides out vertically, and the next layer lifts and slides, and so forth.

The main trick to assembling this one is to get the arrangement of the vertical pieces just right when you start.

Back to wooden puzzles