Day 351 - Impossible Menger Burr

After richgain's excellent guest posts walking us through Burr Tools on Day 348 and Day 349, we couldn't resist giving it a try. As I think we've established, I love Menger sponges and I'm kind of a jerk. So I made a burr puzzle that can never be assembled.

Thingiverse link: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:439478

Settings: The red menger cube was printed on a Replicator 2 at .3mm layer height in 10 minutes, without raft or support, on an acrylic platform. The white cross was printed on another Replicator 2 (don't judge, they had a warehouse sale for the last remaining Rep2's and... well...) at .3mm layer height in 8 minutes, with raft and support on a glass platform with tape.

Technical notes, Burr Tools flavor: I have to give serious thanks and appreciation to the author of Burr Tools, Andreas Roever. Burr Tools has a lot of features that I haven't even attempted yet, including triangle and sphere grids and a whole lot more. And it's free. In addition it solves the puzzles you construct. And it's smart about it; for example, the menger+cross puzzle I made has a solution if you can get the cross into the cube. So it has an "assembly". But it doesn't have a "solution" because you can't actually perform the assembly. This is reported correctly by Burr Tools in the left column of the picture below. Very impressive and useful!

Thanks also go out to Derek Bosch, himself a creator of amazing and intricate puzzles, who wrote the code for the OSX port and also sent me a direct link to the most updated version of Burr Tools so I could run it on my Mac. Here's that link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/burrtools/files/latest/download .