FTO

Speedcube Shop has beening running an ad lately for a new FTO. It is stickerless which is a plus and has magnets which might be helpful for doing slice moves. Although it is very appealing, it has been so long since I've solved my old FTO with icky stickers that I'm not really sure I would get my money's worth out of a new one. Since I have enough extra stickers on hand that replacing the stickers is an option, it would be good to know if it is worth the hassle. 

Before looking up what I had done before I wanted to try to solve it and see if I could. There are only 3 kinds of pieces: corners, edges, and centers. It is pretty easy to solve the corners using simple moves. I wasn't quite sure how I did it but the corners were easily solved. Later when I did look at notes I had made years ago, it says solve the white corners then either the yellows are solved or are one EPS away. The next thing I did was use setup moves and an 8-move 3-cycle to solve the edges after sliding whichever ones I could into place without messing up others. Setup moves and another 8-move 3-cycle can be used to solve all the centers. 

This method is very simple and straightforward to me, and I believe that I worked out this solution years ago. But then I saw how others did it, or at least one other method, and it solved centers after the corners and used some simple up-replace-down moves to do so, but there was a little bit of a complexity to it too inthat the white layer had to be in the back left or back right, and you could only solve half the centers this way so had to know which colors you could do. I guess back then it impressed me enough to write it down. After all there are 24 centers, so if you can do half of them in a relatively easy manner, why not, but in solving it today I naturally reverted to my commutator method. 

It might be good to see if I can wrap my head around using up-replace-down-goback for some of the edges. There are only 12 edges, but if I can do some of them with only 4 moves instead of 8, why not? 

Why do I like my method even though it may not be the most efficient as far as moves go? It is totally a visual thing. I find it easiest to work with the centers when the edges are already in place. 

Replacing the old icky stickers with a new set of leftover stickers from a past stickering project seemed like a good idea. After removing the old ones I was doing my best to clean the residue off the puzzle when it popped apart and a few pieces came loose. Instead of pushing them back in I decided to take the whole thing apart and and clean them all best I could. Lubing the springs seemed like the next logical step. Now the FTO is totally reassembled and stickered. Making equilateral triangle stickers out of square stickers did not have perfect results, but it works. And they feel much better than the old ones.

Now, back to the commutators. I finally finished the new improved FTO solution guide in a Google Doc. Yay.

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.