Sunday, September 17, 2017

Two-stage Cryptex: Fabrication and build


As it turns out, it's a lot harder to fabricate things when you aren't a student that has a 24 hour machine shop at your disposal (or a free machine shop anywhere, period). Bemoaning my separation from the CSAIL shop/stockroom and the ever-helpful staff of the Pappalardo machine shop, I began my lengthy search for outside resources. 

First up were the two endcaps, which absolutely needed some portion, if not all, of them to be CNC machined. I shopped around at a number of fabrication services (as an aside, why does every place require you to submit a model and then wait around for a quote? It's incredibly awkward to ask for a quote from someone for a tiny one-off personal project, knowing their answer will be way outside your budget and use case). Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of the companies I'm going to mention, I'm just a broke recent-grad who designed a thing way beyond her means to produce at a reasonable price.

Monday, July 31, 2017

Two-stage Cryptex: CAD Design

It is a truth universally acknowledged that raccoons like puzzles. Raccoons like, in fact, touching all things:

raccoon (n.) Look up raccoon at Dictionary.com
also racoon, c. 1600, arocoun, from Algonquian (Powhatan) arahkun, from arahkunem "he scratches with the hands." Early forms included Capt. John Smith's raugroughcum. In Norwegian, vaskebjørn, literally "wash-bear."
Disgusting.

Whether I like it or not, I have long suffered (like, for two whole years) an excess of raccoons and abundant inevitable raccooning from my boyfriend, who is absolutely three raccoons in a trenchcoat. And we both love puzzles. One of our first dates was an escape room, which, while having the possibility of turning out horribly, we absolutely destroyed. He introduced me to Myst via Steam gift while I was bedridden after surgery, and I in turn introduced him to the style of puzzle hunts, e.g. MIT Mystery Hunt. For my birthday/christmas last year, he gave me an ingenious Japanese puzzle box, inside which he had hidden a puzzle hunt that he himself wrote. Thus, I was inspired to create my own physical fiddly puzzle box, complete with puzzles and a small gift inside, to satisfy both raccooning and puzzling tendencies. But a single puzzle to fiddle with was too easy, and so I began to investigate a double-stage puzzle box, resulting in the design of this two-stage cryptex.

SolidWorks model