Old School

Pyramid
Power

In the 1930s and 1940s, home electronic entertainment was mostly limited to listening to the radio. Instead of playing video games, surfing the web, or watching TV as many do today, our grandparents amused themselves in the evenings by reading, crafting, pursuing hobbies, and playing games and puzzles.

The Giant Home Workshop Manual, published in 1941, offered a variety of games and toys that people could build in their home workshops, including a ping-pong table, a pocket chess set with thumbtacks for pieces, a Rock’em Sock’em Robots-esque boxing game made from dowels, and a backyard aerial glide (much like MAKE magazine’s backyard zip line: makezine.com/05/zipline).

The simplest toy project in this book is also one of the most fun. It’s a wooden puzzle consisting of two identical prism-shaped pieces. The challenge is to put them together to form a three-sided pyramid.

The book claims the puzzle is “more difficult than it looks, and likely to confound some self-styled experts.” After testing out the one I made on various family members, I agree.

The book calls for a planer to shape blocks of wood. I don’t have a planer, but I have a computer and a printer, so I drew a cut-and-fold template using Adobe Illustrator, printed it out, and glued together the two paper blocks. (You can download the PDF template, which includes assembly instructions, at craftzine.com/03/oldschool.)

If, after building the puzzle, you find yourself stumped, ask some friends to try to solve it. It’s a win-win situation: you’ll either learn how to do it, or end up feeling good knowing that they aren’t any smarter than you. ×

>> Mark Frauenfelder is editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine. mark@boingboing.net

 

See if you can assemble these 2 blocks to form a pyramid.

Two-Piece Pyramid Block Puzzle Folds are shown as dashed lines and cuts are solid. The tabs can be glued (I used a glue stick). The blocks look nicer if you insert the tabs inside the blocks, rather than glue them to the outside surfaces.

Fold pieces to resemble the blocks shown at bottom. The object is to place the pieces together to make a three-sided pyramid.

Print on a piece of paper and then cut, fold, and glue.

Fold paper into two blocks, as shown.