Soma Cube

I asked for a specific woodworking book for Christmas a while ago: Wood Logic Puzzles: 18 Three Dimensional Games for the Hands & Mind (www.barnesandnoble.com/w/craft…) I was super enthusiastic about this book, so I'm ashamed to say that I asked for this for Christmas of 2015, and I've only just now gotten around to making something out of it. In my defense, there's a lot of prep work involved before you can even start making one of these. Truing your tablesaw to 90 degrees is just good everyday craftsmanship. Building a crosscut jig so you can cut lots of tiny pieces the same size is a project in and of itself. Fortunately this book has instructions for all of that.

I'm pretty happy at how this first puzzle turned out. Specifically I'm happy that I was able to get 27 tiny wood cubes close enough to the same size (3/4 of an inch on all sides) so the seven individual shapes they make can be put together into a 3x3 cube. This puzzle is called a Soma cube, and supposedly there are 240 different configurations that they can be put together into a cube. I was lucky to just find one, and I made the thing.

This is made from scraps of whatever I had lying around: African Cypress and cherry mostly, although a large piece I found at the Scrap Exchange in Durham NC might have been walnut.