Bandage Cube Kit—Double Block

Double Block is another one of Burgo's creations. On October 28, 2012 he posted:

OK, Mildly Addicted here :oops:
I thought I'd make an easy one.. turned out to be `a little tougher` than I first thought. *Warning* this one's trouble :wink: . I called it the Double Block.. for more than one reason. My method for this one is a little scrappy at present, see what you think.

He listed it as Difficult, and added another bandage, calling it Double Block Clock, which he listed as Very Hard. I don't know about Double Block Clock yet, but Double Block fell together nicely for me. I wonder if there is something in the scrambling that I am missing that would make it more difficult. I don't think so, but if someone would like to challenge me with a Double Block scramble, I'd me more than willing to try it out.

With the two blocks solved and Green Up and White on the Left, the 5 corners, and 5 of the 7 edges are easily permuted with moves of R and U. My main algorithms?

1. (Ri U R Ui) x n and (R U Ri Ui) x n where n is an element of {1, 2, 3}. In other words, EPS, Double-EPS, and Triple-EPS.

2. Ui L2 D L2 U moves FD and BD into U and R.

3. (R U R Ui R U R Ui R) swaps UR and UB and cycles 4 corners.

4. (R U Ri U R U2 Ri)—Sune— works with Yellow Up and Green Right, but in my solves so far I haven't used it to move edges.

5. I haven't come up with, or needed, a 3-cycle of corners. The 3 double swaps have been adequate for permuting corners.

6. Twisting Corners—to me, this is what puts this puzzle in the Difficult range. First, I'll give the algorithm, then I'll explain how I came up with it.

Twisting 6 clock and 7 anti Steps
1. Hold Yellow Up and Green on R.
2. ((Right-hand Sune) (DE)2 L (Left-hand Sune) Li (DE)2) x 3
3. Hold White on Left and Green Up.
4. (R U Ri Ui) x 3
5. (Ri U R Ui) x 3

No long, complex, unfamiliar sequences at all! But how did I come up with that process? Well, I knew I could use Sune with Yellow Up and Green on the Right. I knew that because of the 2x2x1 block I couldn't use the Sune/mirror method of twisting corners simply. But what did I have to lose. Figured I would try to do something like it and see what happened. I did it 3 times to preserve the edges. After step 2 I went back to White on the Left and Green Up and looked at the corners. I saw that corner 2 (FRU) needed to go to 3 (RFD) so I did the Triple-EPS that would do that. Then I looked at the corners and saw that 2 and 7 (URB) needed to swap, and 6 (DRB) and 8 (ULB) needed to swap, so I did the Triple-EPS that would do that. Then I looked at the corners and noticed that 6 twisted clockwise and 7 anti-clockwise. Golden. :D

August 3, 2014
Oh no!!!! I was afraid it couldn't be that easy. After having such an easy time "figuring out" Double Block, I moved on to Double Block Clock. The Clock part made it impossible to twist corners as with Double Block. So I was exploring different things I could do with it, and discovered a whole new way of scrambling Double Block that does funky things like flipping edges. So no more DB Clock until I have a go at the revisited Double Block with new twists and turns not covered on the first go round.

7. Flipping Edges—(U2 L F Li U2) Ri (U2 L F Li U2) R flips UB and RB and restores FD.