Apple Tree

Designer: Benjamin Heidt

This puzzles measures: 70 mm x 70 mm x 120 mm

Material: Acacia, Padauk, Am. Walnut

Kevin Sadler wrote about it:

“Here we have another very interesting design from Benjamin Heidt. It’s a beautiful apple tree shaped burl complete with apples between the leaves. It’s been wonderfully crafted using American walnut, acacia with Padauk apples. It takes a bit of fiddling and exploring in all directions to find the first piece that moves and then, if you’re anything like me, there’s a moment of “Oh my god!!!” in different directions followed by a slight panic and I quickly decided to go back to the beginning and found out it wasn’t going to work – aaargh, it took a frantic few minutes to put it together and I gasped and girded myself before trying again. For me it’s the puzzle version of a roller coaster as I did it a few times and figured out how it locked and unlocked and quickly found that I had left a few pieces in place where I could determine the position and orientation. After removing 4 or 5 the trunk fell off and got a bit rumpled again. I was lost! Despite that it remained The puzzle is pretty stable, even though everything was moving. I actually tried to remove the remaining pieces, but they wouldn’t fall apart. I took it apart piece by piece over the next 20 minutes and, boy, are there a lot of pieces. After all that, I didn’t even do the main challenge! This is not a wonderfully designed sequential puzzle, as I alluded to above…it’s actually an assembly puzzle – the tree as received is in the “transportation configuration” – the real goal of the puzzle is to reassemble the tree but with 3 red apples on each side of the tree. There’s no way I’m going to reassemble the transportation solution without help, let alone the main challenge, so I head to Burrtools to draw the pieces. Great fun!”