Set of six 6-piece cylindrical burr puzzles

I went looking for cylindrical burr puzzles after I saw some very expensive brass ones on line.  There are whole research papers on line about standard square cross-section burr puzzles, but I could find little about puzzles where the pieces are cylindrical, with the exception of so called “bullet puzzles” which typically have six bullets that mesh together in a similar way to my puzzles.  I was interested to see what different shaped pieces could be used to create the final shape, and found that nearly all bullet puzzles out there use the same collection of pieces and are very easy to solve.

For my puzzles I identified about a dozen possible puzzles that form the same final shape, and selected six of them for this model.  I tried to rate them by how easy I found them to solve, and have numbered the puzzles 1 to 6, with 1 being the easiest, and 6 the hardest (although that rating is obviously subjective).

I printed them each in a different colour of Bambu Lab PLA Silk+, along with one in PLA Basic to check that worked too.  If you want a bigger challenge, print them all in the same colour and mix the pieces together!

It was important to me that the puzzles fitted together sufficiently tightly that they didn't just fall apart if someone picked one up the wrong way.  Consequently the tolerances are quite tight, and it may take a bit of force to assemble them the first time.

Print settings are based on the standard 0.2mm layer height, with the following changes:

3 walls, as some of the silk filaments are a little translucent and infill was visible

4 bottom layers

outer wall first for maximum dimensional accuracy

adaptive cubic infill at 25%

tree supports

no brim

Enjoy!