Friday, November 23, 2012

CubeTwist All-in-One Bandage Kit—Stalactites and Stalagmites

Stalactites and Stalagmites—another design shared by Burgo on the twistypuzzles forum. It was extremely difficult to scramble it. When it finally looked scrambled a decent amount, it was quite simple to solve, but fun.

CubeTwist All-in-One Bandage Kit—Stalactites

Stalactites—from the twistypuzzles.com forum thread authored by Burgo. Burgo has had fun not only designing and solving different bandage configurations, but also sharing many of them on the thread and ranking them according to difficulty. My solves so far were all from his "Quite Easy" list. Stalactites is from his "A bit harder" list.

Stalactites should be a simple matter of getting the bandaged pieces, then all the corners, then using a simple edge commutator, and possibly an edge flipper.  I say should be because I sometimes have trouble keeping track of setup moves and backtracking when a bandaged piece gets in the way.

One interesting thing that has come of this is that a simple edge pure 3-cycle that I do not normally use could prove to be quite useful. Here is how it works. Say I want to move piece A on top to B on top to C in the middle layer. A to middle layer; replace with C; C to top; replace with B; B to middle; replace with A; A to top; replace with C. Yeah yeah yeah, it is Through the Door Bam! Or the Down-Replace-Up commutator. Why don't I use this? Ah, upon reflection it is clear. The normal way I solve cubes, it just doesn't come up. But with Stalactites, it very well could.

Here is another pure edge 3-cycle: R' E R2 E' R' does RU to FL to RD.