The Case Of The Perplexing Orange Spaghetti – Orange Perplex

The Crime Scene

It was a day, a day like any other day as I went about my daily routine.  The coffee tasted like yesterday’s cigarettes and the newspaper regurgitated the same old political woes destined to repeat for eternity.  Just a normal day.  And then it, walked into my life looking like bad news needing a place to roost.  I could already tell it was not going to end well.  These things never have happy endings.  Investigating the scene of the crime, I could see the guts of the victim decorating everything in the vicinity.  From the state of the remains, it appears that the victim was knocked over, not once but several times as it tried to recover but it never had a chance. 

And thus begins the tale of The Case Of The Perplexing Orange Spaghetti.  How did the victim get knocked over?  Why wasn’t it able to hold on?  Why were there no witnesses?  What was the motive?  Where was the weapon?  Was the room locked?

The principle point of this pitiful plot is how the simple printing of a recently released No Problems Puzzle progressed into a perplexing Orange Perplex problem.  This is the very same Orange Perplex puzzle that was recently reviewed a couple of weeks ago (No Problem Puzzles, Update #3).

Take 2

Orange Perplex consists of 15 segments that are divided into 5 pieces with each having 3 segments.  The segments of each piece are connected at a different level within the orange from the other pieces.  It arrives as a print-in-place model.  That means that it is printed with all the pieces in the solved configuration.  It’s like magic.  But not the type of black magic that transforms an orange into spaghetti.  Squash maybe, but not an orange.

I decided to eschew the suggestion to print the puzzle with rafts and supports.  Normally, I get excellent adhesion when 3D printing and avoid rafts.  I always end up regretting using them and I hate having to deal with raft rash.  However, sometimes you just can’t avoid it.

The problem is not that the model is print-in-place, but that a major portion of the orange segments hang out over the base before they can be counterbalanced when connected with other segments.  For me, this resulted in segments falling out from the puzzle.  And what does the 3D printer do when what it’s printing on takes a walk?  It keeps right on going assuming that it’s there.  Unless of course your printer has that fancy shmancy automatic spaghetti detection feature.

When I checked in on my first printing attempt about halfway through, one of the segments had detached from the plate and rolled out.  I was very surprised that the adhesion failed.  Should I kill the print?  Nah, by this time, some spaghetti had filled the gap and the print was still proceeding nicely.  I would just have to reprint that one piece.

Singled Out and Flipped

When I came back at the end, I was greeted with a full plate of orange spaghetti.  What happened?  Well, it appears that another segment failed.  I’m guessing that it was filling that segment with spaghetti until it was able to continue.  However, the spaghetti filling might not have been very stable and that piece may have tilted.  Once that happens, you’re doomed.  Tilting means one side goes down but the other goes up.  The part sticking up will then catch the housing of the hot end or the hot end itself.  Best case scenario, that part gets pushed to the side or the entire print gets detached from the plate.  I don’t even want to think about the worst case scenario.

Having learned my lesson, I reprinted it with rafts and supports.  And guess what?  A segment still fell out.  Very disappointing but at least it failed near the end and spaghetti supports aided in it’s recovery.  Only 1 piece was affected and I reprinted that one upside-down so that the bridge connecting the 3 segments occurs early on.

In examining the segments, they all appear to have fallen out when the bridge was just being formed.  In all cases, the thin lip of the forming bridge appears to be curled up which may have led them to be knocked loose by the hot end.  I’ll have to keep an eye on this in the future.

And finally, was the room locked?  No.  But my printer is enclosed and the door was shut, so there should have been a consistent temperature within the enclosure and across the plate.  Of course, I’ve never tested the temperature gradient across the plate.  Does anyone really do that?

Orange Perplex

Flattenry Will Get You Nowhere – Soma Tray

Over the last several years, the Soma Cube developed by Piet Hein has suffered a lot of abuse.  Since the 7 pieces forming a cube has 480 solutions, various tortuous methods have been employed to jettison 479 of them leaving the puzzle with a unique solution.  One of these time-honored methods is to squash it.  This involves picking one of the 480 (or maybe more appropriately 240 to avoid the mirror) solutions and scaling it down along one of it’s 3 dimensions.  To be quite honest, I do not know if every combination results in a unique solution but I’ve always assumed that squashing the Soma cube is a uniquifying process.

Soma Tray was designed by Rick Eason in 2016 and used as his exchange puzzle at the 41st International Puzzle Party in 2025, suggesting it sat on the shelf for 9 years.  In fact, it looks like it was buried on a shelf resulting in a somewhat flattened appearance.  OK, a very flatted appearance.  My guess is that it’s flattened shape under a heap of other puzzle prototypes had doomed it from seeing the world.  However, as we now know, it successfully escaped and made itself know. 

The puzzle consists of the 7 squashed Soma pieces with 1 dimension about a quarter of the size of the other 2.  All the pieces are flat with 5 of them having a single squashed cube added on top.  As the name of the puzzle would indicate, there is also a tray.  The tray is 5x3x2 with the 2-layer Z dimension representing the flattened dimension.  There is also a 1x3x1 shape affixed to the bottom of the tray, 1 unit from the end.  This provides a 2-layer 3x3 area on the left and 1x3 area on the right.  Both the pieces and the tray are made from laser-cut veneered wood.  The tray also has the name of the puzzle as well as additional information debossed along the rim of the tray.

Soma Tray comes with 2 challenges.  The first is to build a typical, albeit squashed, Soma in the 3x3 area of the tray.  I’m assuming that this is a uniquified Soma cube but I didn’t verify that.  The second challenge is to fill the tray with all 7 pieces.

The puzzle arrives nicely packed in the tray except for a single square sticking up from the tray.  Needless to say, filling the tray is not achieved by simply flipping that piece over.  Since the tray arrives with 1 piece sticking out, I obviously wanted to fix it and started with the second challenge.  I immediately dumped the pieces out to start with a clean state and embark on fixing the problem.  I know I said that you couldn’t just flip over that one piece in the original packing state to solve it but honestly, I just assumed that.  Maybe the joke is on me.

Since the right side of the tray limited that pieces that could be placed there, that’s where I started.  This definitely turned out the way to go as the spillover into the 3x3 side helped put the final pieces in place there.  I should also note that I solved it a second time and ended up with the a mirror image of the first solution.

Having completed the first, or technically, the second challenge, I proceeded to work on creating a squashed cube.  After some random attempts, I decided to think about the relationship between the pieces with and without the extra cube.  This gave the direction that I needed and soon after, I had a squashed cube nestled in the tray.  Since the other challenge had a mirror solution, I checked the cube as well and sure enough, the solution to this challenge had one as well.

Soma Tray is not a difficult puzzle but I did enjoy the challenges.  I also like how the pieces store in the tray.  And you can never have enough Soma variants.