Introduction: Copper Pipe Cryptex or How to Give a More Entertaining Gift . . .

About: I am a recent recipient of a BS in Computer Science. Currently working for an eDiscovery company as a web repository technician (hosting, searching and helping attorneys to process their electronic data) but w…

My friend and I started giving gifts in unusual ways a while ago and while this fledgling idea is just taking off for us we expect it to amount to epic proportions rapidly.

It all started when I gave him his gift one year inside an alice and wonderland movie case and escalated from there eventually as we got more inventive things got more elablorate.
For my birthday he wrapped mine in a box and then encased said box in about 100+lbs of concrete which required the use of a sledge hammer and much laughing to extract.

The gifts we give usually are fun and somewhat inconsequential (a knife here, DVD there, t-shirts . . .etc.) but the manner in which we wrap them becomes a gift in and of itself!

For his birthday this year I decided to pull a mini DaVinci Code/National Treasure -esque hunt.

I gave him a hand made card (so much better than those mass-produced empty salutations from the grocery) which had a riddle hidden inside it. Most people don't unfold these sorts of cards so it wasn't immediately apparent. The riddle's answer was the 5 letter word which would open the other portion of what he got on his birthday . . . a home-made cryptex made mostly from copper pipe. This cryptex took the longest out of the whole process but was certainly the most fun and it really amounts to the main portion of the gift.
Inside was a usb thumb drive which I hacked a little bit with linux's DD command so that the OS would believe it to be a CD. I then wrote an autorun, gave it an icon, and included the next riddle. . .when he inserts it into his box a webpage pops up with a riddle on it. Enter the correct answer (abstracted and secured via javascript and encryption of course) and hit the button and a word pops up. He gave me the word and I gave him a folded piece of paper with yet another riddle. inside the paper was a key. Within the folds I wrote a number. The solution lead to the ceramics studio lockers, the number corresponded to a locker number and the key opened the lock to reveal the final gift: a DVD.

The construction of the Cryptex itself is actually quite sturdy: I ended up using 4 different diameters of copper pipe and soldiered the pieces together. It is designed in such a way that for any movement at all of the insert, all letters must be correct. I had polished it initially but we both feel the oxidized copper looks better so he has not tried to polish it. And, yes . . .it weighs a TON!
I wonder what he's going to come back with . . .