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Step 12Optional step - labels!
My newly-acquired cubing habit has not only spawned a bunch of weird project ideas like this, but has also seen me gather lots of official cube junk to me, and as such, I have a stack of nice PVC labels (the polypropylene are crap - steer clear of these immediately-peeling nightmares).
Many people, including me, prefer the beauty of the clear cube, but as this one is my first, and kind of homebrew looking, and because it got boring having nothing to solve, I applied some official labels and made it a real cube, albeit satisfyingly heavier. You really feel you could do some damage throwing this little cannon ball.
The only thing to note here, besides making sure you center them carefully, is that if you want it to be official, you need to put orange opposite red, green across from blue, and yellow on the flip side of white. Also, you need to get the winding order correct. For example, if white faces up (and thus yellow down), and blue faces you (and thus green away), then red needs to be the left face, and orange the right.
Enjoy your new cube, labeled or not, and remember that if you want to apply imagery to the faces of the cube, the edges and corners will always work out again when you solve it, but the centers can end up in 1 of 4 rotations, which greatly increases the number of possible solutions, and makes solving it by traditional methods all kinds of way harder. You can use that to your advantage in a cube with a pattern that can have its subcomponents twist without getting messed up.
Luckily, the magnetocube is easy to take apart and put back together, either way :)
Many people, including me, prefer the beauty of the clear cube, but as this one is my first, and kind of homebrew looking, and because it got boring having nothing to solve, I applied some official labels and made it a real cube, albeit satisfyingly heavier. You really feel you could do some damage throwing this little cannon ball.
The only thing to note here, besides making sure you center them carefully, is that if you want it to be official, you need to put orange opposite red, green across from blue, and yellow on the flip side of white. Also, you need to get the winding order correct. For example, if white faces up (and thus yellow down), and blue faces you (and thus green away), then red needs to be the left face, and orange the right.
Enjoy your new cube, labeled or not, and remember that if you want to apply imagery to the faces of the cube, the edges and corners will always work out again when you solve it, but the centers can end up in 1 of 4 rotations, which greatly increases the number of possible solutions, and makes solving it by traditional methods all kinds of way harder. You can use that to your advantage in a cube with a pattern that can have its subcomponents twist without getting messed up.
Luckily, the magnetocube is easy to take apart and put back together, either way :)
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Thanks!
After doing some preliminary sketches, I searched Google for quite awhile, but couldn't find anything but a mention that Erno Rubik originally thought he might have to make his concept magnetic, but he really wanted it to be mechanical, and kept at it until he invented what we have today as the official cube. I took this to mean there wasn't one out there, as I had searched quite a number of possible terms to see if anyone had made a magnetic cube. I like to be thorough.
Later, a friend, not believing me that it hadn't be done misspelled "Rubik's" as "rubix," and managed to google up the idea already in prototype form in China - an actually manufactured, black plastic with silver magnets cube, but the site was a product design place, and they were looking for manufacturers for the idea, with seemingly no takers. Still, it was a tad disappointing to see the whole idea already built.
I would never consider bringing an idea I first learned of through someone else to market, but as I did invent the entire thing, and had 2/3rds built without any outside influence, before my friend found the prior example, and in that I put in all of the legwork to flesh out the design, and build the prototype, figure out magnet polarities, and even make an animated 3D model for myself to get it all figured out right, I could possibly see trying to get the idea manufactured here in America. Then non-makers, or busy makers could just buy them.
Of course, I can be pretty lazy, so I'll likely never act on that :)
here is a link to the wiki on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubik's_Cube
I would like to state that a magnetic cube I think is far superior so your instructable has got to be the most important thing in the Rubik's world since the mass production that allowed us all to know about it and get to play with one. now we all need one that is magnetic based :D
Also, to see how it works go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaDY80TsTuQ