Windmill Burr

#34 of 40 made

This 12 piece burr has all the hallmarks of a Junichi Yananose design and a few surprises too. It looks straight forward but it’s surprisingly difficult. The design is elegantly symmetrical. The visibility into the puzzle is amazing and yet once together it’s very stable. It has a unique assembly and solution. It takes 20 moves to get the first pieces out. The puzzle has lots of pieces that move at the same time; some of these moves include up to 5 or 6 pieces moving at the same time, counted as a single move.

When you have a puzzle with so many parts moving at the same time it needs to be very accurately cut. By definition this (and the time involved to assemble the puzzle – although hopefully Brian will get better with practice at putting them together!) does not lend itself to mass production; hence a perfect design for a Limited Edition series.

During 2007 Junichi was researching some of the subspecies of the Alterkruse puzzle. The Windmill Burr is one of the variations that came from that project.

The puzzle is made from Queensland Maple.

Knowing that the wrap-around ends had to be glued to the puzzle later Brian was inspired by the name Windmill to add decorative detail to them to give the effect of a Windmill in motion. The ends have been laminated with Western Australian Jarrah and Queensland Silver Ash.

Having done that he now knows why the Japanese master woodworkers only add a shaving of veneer to the outside of the boxes and don’t actually use it to construct the box. A lot of laminating, and a lot of stock used, to get this effect, but the end result was well worth it.