DIY 3D Cube Puzzle

Design your own and 3D print your puzzle with these instructions!

This puzzle is based on an ancient brain-teaser the Soma Cube,

The cube is challenging for children and adults. Have hours of fun. Kids love it.

The objective of this puzzle is to take the puzzle apart and then put it back together into its original cube shape. It is quite harder than it looks.

If you do not have a 3D printer, it is absolutely fine because this puzzle can be made out of wooden blocks as well!

Step 1: Gather Materials

For 3D printed puzzle cube you will need:

3D printer

For designing your own puzzle cube you will need:

Building Blocks

CAD (I will be using Autodesk Inventor)

Step 2: Design Your Puzzle Cube

1. To design your puzzle cube, you can simply start playing around with building blocks (ex: legos) and see what type of interesting designs you can come up with.
2. Make your part shape as interesting as possible
3. Design it on your preferred CAD software
4. Assemble it to see if everything fits

Step 3: Get Your Part File Ready to 3D Print

After you have those 5 parts ready, you will need to save them as a .stl file.

After you have saved them as a .stl file, you can push it to your 3D printer for some awesomeness.

You are welcome to 3D print my design if you'd like.

Step 4: Don't Have a 3D Printer? No Problem!

You do not have to have a 3D print this puzzle. You can build the puzzle cube out of wooden cubes!

You will need:

• 27 Wooden cubes
• Wood glue
• Sandpaper

Step 1: design your cube

Step 2: Finalize your design

Step 3: Glue your 5 parts together

You can add make your cube look amazing by spay paint, stencil, and/or stickers.

Tip: Make sure that your cube has a random pattern throughout ( similar to picture above), because it will make solving your cube harder.

Step 5: Solution

This solution is for those who have produced my design.

Now have fun watching your friends/family try for hours on ends, just so that they can solve the puzzle. Most likely they will give up (unless its a child). Watch as their mind gets blown, when you solve it.

Have fun!

Comments

[emptyr00m]

Great tutorial! I know this is from a long time ago, so I'm not really expecting to get an answer anymore... Does anyone know the name of those cubes they're using for prototyping? The ones with the four square holes on each side.

[apburner]

Nice ible. But the Soma is a puzzle cube made from 7 pieces. It has 6 pieces with each having 4 cubes and one piece having 3 cubes. Much more complex building fun. Plus the original had puzzles you could do with 2 sets and with 4 sets. I has 2 sets in the 1960's. Had a blast with them. And I found 27 different ways to put together a cube with just one set. Not counting the mirrors.

[CuriosityMachine]

Ah yes indeed. I based this puzzle on the soma cube. Maybe one day I'll try to design my own, sounds fun and challenging!

[Hobbytik]

Use Burrtools (a free program on internet) and you can design every puzzle from basic (elementary) cubes, so called polycubes. Good luck and happy puzzling. Ad van der Schagt NL

[Cyberchipz]

Yes, I had a soma cube when I was much younger and remember it well, as mentioned by apburner. In fact, one of the puzzles you could make was the pyramid (sort of) step 4; but, instead of completing the cube, you put the red part on the top and flipped for a partial stepped pyramid shape.

[Fastaco226]

Do you by chance go to civic memorial high school?

[CuriosityMachine]

Sorry no, I can see why, there's a ton of ied classes across the nation and most of us have worked on the puzzle cube project.

[Stan1y]

I made one of these or something like it from a 4x4 fencepost as a garden toy for my nieces and nephew I scaled it up from one I'd made at school from 1cm wooden cubes

[CuriosityMachine]

Do you have any pictures of it? A 1ft puzzle cube sounds pretty awesome :)

[Stan1y]

I'll ask my sister if they still have it, youngest is now 8 so it might have been left behind during a house move or gone to a nursery school.

[thedarklightx343]

IED FLASHBACKS! NOOOoooooo

[CuriosityMachine]

Ah yes. I don't know about you but we did a ton (but ton I mean A LOT) of sketches, and designs for this project. But then again the autodesk inventor certification felt nice.

[TheOtherOne2711]

I did one of these for my engineering class last year.

[CuriosityMachine]

I did mine this year and thought that'd I'd share it because everyone was trying to solve it and were wondering how to make one.