Buffalo Mao Puzzle Level C Peels

These are the last nine block peels of the Buffalo Mao puzzle blocks. Now comes the fun part. Making the mock up I made a single block blank to wrap out of scraps of foam board and masking tape. Just to support the corners for taping. I still haven't stuck any on wooden blocks.  

Buffalo Mao Puzzle Level B Nine Peels

These nine peels are from the middle layer (from the top).

They are blocks 1-9 of Level B.

Buffalo Mao Puzzle Level A, Nine Peels

The 27 blocks each have both names and icons that locate them in the stack. From the top down the three levels are called A, B, and C. Each block has a number from 1-9 and a letter that tells what layer it's from, and a matching icon in the lower right corner of the page it's on.

                                                                   

                                                                                     

Nine is a lot of pictures for one post, but just                                                     enough to contain the top layer A 1-9 of this                                                       puzzle.

Buffalo Mao Puzzle Blocks

This seemed so simple at first. Maybe if it was one layer. This set of blocks is three layers of 9, 27 blocks in all. The 18 pictures found 6 per axis are from the Buffalo Mao comic book, plus one that wasn't originally included. These three pictures show a couple of different views of the mock-up I pieced together to work out the peel pasterns ( that's why they look a little ragged and have some tape showing).






                          The list bellow shows what's where axis wise.

 The address maps (three pages worth) show how to map your own 18 pictures onto a set of 27 blocks.

To the left is a full size (Biggest I could print reliably on an 8 1/2 x 11) template for building yer own peels on. Below it is a template for one of the 18 pictures for your own puzzle. All these patterns are made to print well on an 8 1/2 x 11 inch sheet. A full set of the 27 peels for the Buffalo Mao puzzle blocks is in the next post.

Shh, Here Come Tha...

After searching through over 2,000 pictures for several days, I must now face it. I have made and allowed 2 sets of my favorite wooden Teefes to get away and I've only got about 6 pictures (some blurry) to show. Now lest you get the wrong idea, the Toothy Fairy trap (a modified re-purposed mouse trap) has had it's spring cut. The little green bungee was once a hair tie. Now it's a safety spring.
It sounds fun to catch a Tooth Fairy, but there's nothing funny about a Tooth Fairy with a broken leg.

 When I started drawing cartoons about Teefes (tea-fez) I soon realized that the highly realistic looking ones weren't near as much fun as the pen and ink onna-block-looking ones. Instead of paint again I stuck with woodburned decorations, and found the more I made the better I liked em.

At first I was still stuck on the idea of making whole sets of wooden teeth. I continued to brush up on tooth anatomy, not a bad idea just an unfinished one. It turns out, teeth are weird, un glamorous, and to put a fine point on it, a little creepy. Bummer! Did I mention unbalanced? Most teeth don't want to stand up. I had run into this before, only much bigger when my lack of insurance and spotty tooth maintenance led me to build a tile crowned, 450 lb molar called LR3 (lower right 3rd from the rear). It definitely cheered me up while I slowly got mine fixed.

 While studying tooth structure in preperation for LR3 I noticed some teeth had really nice features. Significantly more interesting than most. Character, beauty marks, significant modeling, some teeth (from here on refereed to as Teefes, I believe that's how they would refer to each other) just seem more tooth-like "Archa-Teefes". Instead of trying to produce realistic looking Teefes, I attempted to come up with the features that were toothy ( yeah sounds lame to me too). It didn't make much sense but even before I'd made my first dozen I was already thinking about my first hundred.

The Hairy Hendecahedra Project (post two)

If excelsior was as ridiculously cheap and available as it once was, I wouldn't have resorted to such an odd method to try an stabilize my Corex (like cardboard, but plastic) and clear plastic tape mold. This isn't the first time I've tried pouring concrete into a Corex mold.

 The stained dodecaocta compound chilling on the deck with various other old experiments.


Didn't turn out near as crisp as the mold. I was unprepared for the weight of the concrete squishing my mold. Even though I had it sitting in a pile of sand, it still warped some. When I took a big, old rasp and tried to square it up while it was still green, (not totally cured), it was working great and pointing up nicely till I hit the Chert rocks I used to extend my scrap grout (I'd brought home the left overs from work). Then I just had to say, "I meant to do that", and like it a little crooked.

 This time I was a little more hard headed, and employed more heroic methods than a pile of sand. I thought, there's other ways to stabilize a mold. I wanted to try the dry pack, barely damp sand with just a little Portland-cement. this would work great, except it a mess, sand is heavy, yo have to break it up to get the piece out each time... Our deck is small, one fair mess fills it all. I thought what about the vacuum-clothes packing thingy. I considered a lot of stuff to harden with the vac, and settled on rabbit bedding because its cheap and smells good, and is't easy to clean up.

   As long as the vacuum is running, this worked good, sorta. Concrete dries slow, even with hot water. The plastic bag had pleats that didn't lay down, Oh yeah rubber gloves my hands were so rough from the lime in the concrete they felt furry for a week. I pulled the mold the next day, it still wasn't hard hard. I saved the spout stuff to fill with and tried ti point it up. Not so great.

even after a lot of messy tweaking it was a bit saggy not too precise and starting to get squishy (a technical term) enough I knew to let it dry. no way there's allot of these coming this way. It probably woulda worked for plaster, but I wanted furry concrete not plaster. At least I didn't burn up the vacuum cleaner, this time. I gotta say when the vac was running the shavings were very firm, but I doubt I'll try this again.

Two Flattened Spoons

The blocks have been more than fun. I am charged,
 inspired, like totally excited. Oh yeah, and embarrassed like I forgot my cousins name. Well how about another book then. It's not like I forgot you lot. Scratch (another of my digital Batcaves) that, just cause most everybody who's doing it seems to be 8 or nine, doesn't mean coding's easy as an abacus. Like you can multiply with beads on sticks, well they do make that lovely clacking sound.

Show of hands, who knows what happens to scratched, flattened, bent, stained old spoons?

 Oddly enough, I'm not sure what happened to the two flattened spoons that started me down this trail. I found them beside the highway, and put them in my pocket. They were all scratches, and flat enough to start new jobs, but as what?

What if they come back?


I liked making the story, I wanted to see the "flatware" do well.

Really The props were my favorite part and even though I had other pages I didn't love this enough to keep tweaking it. Maybe later. I wanted blocks to play with, and dream about. If I had to choose books or blocks, I needed some new blocks. Oh yeah weird new blocks, the sooner, the stranger, the better.