F-Skewb FTO Adventures

I hadn't scrambled or solved the F-Skewb for years. A month ago the Czech kiddos were here and it got scrambled. When they left to go on their Idaho Family Reunion Adventure I figured I would solve it. Ha. It proved quite challenging. In fact I couldn't do it. I looked up my notes here in the blog and in my Solution Guide spreadsheet but it was all too vague. One thing did refer to the FTO so I thought if I would solve it, which I was confident that I could, it might help me remember the F-Skewb. Nope. I just ended up with 2 scrambled puzzles I couldn't solve instead of 1. Back to the notes. No help. So I forgot about them for a month and went back to the notes today starting with the FTO. Lo and behold, I solved it. 

Corners: Get 3 of one color. The other 3 are either solved or need an EPS to solve them.

Centers:

1. Get the white centers.
2. Solve the gray, blue, and red centers using go get it bring it home. Slice Face Slice' Face'. Make sure the whites are on the bottom back left or bottom back right so that white centers stay put. 
3. 3-cycle the green, orange, purple, and yellow centers home.

Edges: 3-cycle all the edges.

That's it! Easy peasy. Sorta. 

Now let's revisit my Solution Guide notes on how to solve the F-Skewb, or Dino Skewb.

1. White Edges
2. White Corners (Getting the corners now avoids nasty parity problems later)
3. Orient Yellow corners
4. Place middle layer edges each with an even number of turns (Corners may get twisted at this point. That is ok for now.)

In May 2020 in the blog I said, "This puzzle has 3 types of pieces. Experimenting with The Move and the FTO commutator brought it all back. Scramble time!"

And then:

Step 1: Simple twists solve the 4 little skew corners.

Step 2: Simple slices and The Move solve the 12 center pieces.

Step 3: The FTO commutator 3-cycles the ... uh ... edges(?) ... corners(?)

This looks much simpler than the notes in the Guide. Those notes don't even sound like me. Let's give this a go now that I remember how to do the FTO. 

It is finished. But the turning is so bad and it is so catchy that I don't ever want to scramble it again. Perhaps I should throw it away. Or lube the daylights out of it and see if it helps and if it doesn't then throw it away. Or at least attach a note to it explaining that it is not worth the effort.