Introduction: DIY 3D Cube Puzzle

By BHE
About: High School Student. CEO and the founder of a high school's engineering club. Always curious. I love to build and design things that come to my mind. I wanna open up a ice cream parlor because I want free ice …

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.

Attachments

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!