My entry for the Sinterit competition: A piece of mechanical, mathematical art. The Releauxminx is a puzzle, in the same vein as Rubik’s Cube, albeit significantly more difficult to solve. It has the internal mechanism of a canonical face-turning dodecahedron, and the external geometry of a reuleaux tetrahedron. I like to think of it as a four-sided puzzle that thinks it has twelve-sides. The geometry of the puzzle, particularly with it’s rounded exterior and blocky interior mechanism, makes it difficult to print with a typical FDM 3D printer, which I have done above. With an SLS printer, not only can all of the pieces be printed accurately without sacrificing the exterior surface quality of pieces, but the core, which usually requires twenty-five separately printed pieces, can be reduced to a single, relatively simple mechanical part.

With a Sinterit Lisa Desktop SLS machine, all of the pieces could be printed in one go. Unfortunately, significantly more extensive modification of the design would be required in order to print the whole thing fully assembled-- the closest I can get to that without having an actual SLS printer to experiment with (*wink wink*) is reducing the part count of the core from 25 to 1, which I have done here, and detailed above.

I had the stickers cut by somebody else, because I’m a puzzle traditionalist, and I like colored stickers on each face of the puzzles I design. They aren’t necessary-- this puzzle changes shape with each turn, and so you could elect not to sticker it at all, and face the near equally difficult task of solving it by shape alone.

My original prototype, now slightly outdated with a 25-piece core, was originally published here. This version is designed to have significantly better turning quality, and tolerances have been tightened to account for the accuracy of SLS printers.