Avoiding The Dangers Of Wood – Splinter 12

Splinter 12 is the latest design by Nan Ma, continuing his series of coordinate motion wonders.  As with the prior designs, it is made by Nothing Yet Designs (NYD) and was featured in their last release.  It looks fantastic, 3D printed using gradient green filament.  And it’s a lot heavier than I expected, eschewing the default 3D printer infill setting and using something much more solid that gives it the heft of wood.  However, attempting to make Splinter 12 out of wood would be unrealistic.

The geometry of Splinter 12 is amazing!  It consists of 12 identical pieces that form a cube when assembled.  The pieces look a bit like winged creatures where each wing provides a large flat surface on the side of the cube as well as small triangular shape on an adjacent side.

Splinter 12 arrives fully assembled and the first challenge is to take it apart.  This can be accomplished in 2 different ways.  You can take the time to carefully analyze the cube to determine how to elegantly manipulate the cube to extract the pieces or you can take the crude and oh-so-effective shortcut of Blast-Hedroning it like I did.  Either way, you’ll end up with 12 identical pieces that now need to be reassembled into a cube, a much more difficult endeavor.

As with all the puzzles in the series, the difficulty is not figuring out where the pieces go but to actually perform the simultaneous movement of all the pieces so that they collapse into their target shape.  Luckily, with Splinter 12 being a cube, there is a nice flat surface that can be nicely supported by a table, which is a huge advantage.

Putting together 4 pieces to form a side is the warm up exercise.  Using that as the bottom, adding the next 4 pieces is not too challenging either.  However, those last 4 pieces are a different matter.  I’d describe adding them as: 1 – Not that bad, 2 – Same as 1 if it is directly opposite of the other and still reasonable if it’s adjacent, 3 – This is the eye opener to the looming problem, and 4 – Getting that last piece in place is nigh impossible.  Looking at the cube with 1 piece missing, it slowly dawns on you that the last piece has to be simultaneously under and on top of things which requires everything to be expanded to its limits.

There were multiple times when my expanded cubic universe collapsed in disarray, leaving me with a pile of unbound splinters.  Getting that last pieces in place is so challenging that I started to work on developing piece subsets that can be put together.  And if you took it apart slowly, it would give you a clue on how that could be accomplished.  However, if you’re like me, we don’t need no stink’n clues to solve a puzzle.  I won’t mention how many puzzles I have hanging around in the unsolved state and quietly segue to the finale.

After several attempts I managed to get all unders under overs and overs over unders so that the pieces collapsed into a single united entity in one coordinated group hug.  Kumbaya!

Splinter 12 is an excellent addition to Nan Ma’s series and as of this post is still available at Nothing Yet Designs.  If you enjoyed the others in the series, you will certainly enjoy this one as well.  Can’t wait to see what Nan will come up with next!

Reviews of the prior puzzles in the series can be found here:

• Nothing Yet Designs Release: 13 January 2025, 12:00 PM EST
• Blast-Hedron 4
• Blast-Hedron 6
• Nothing Yet Designs Release: 7 February 2025, 12:00 PM EST
• Blast-Hedron 12
• Nothing Yet Designs Release: 20 March 2025, 12:00 PM EDT
• Blast-Hedron 8