Rising Peaks – Everest

Designer: Girish Sharma

This puzzle measures: 60 mm x 60 mm x 60 mm

Material: Acacia, Maple, Padauk, Wenge

Girish Sharma wrote about it:
“Following on the trend set by Heavy Lifter, I am proud to present the next record breaking 4x4x4 IC : Rising Peaks – Everest. With a level of 16, this breaks my previous record of 12 by a good margin. I have a few other puzzles in the “Rising Peaks” series which are a little lower level, but I am hoping to find an even higher level full cube 4x4x4 IC in the future. As always this is an interlocking cube, so no rotations required.” 

Kevin Sadler wrote about it:
“This is another of Girish Sharma’s amazing interlocking cube creations.  Judging from the name Rising Peaks hyphenated with a mountain name, I suspect this is the first in a whole series of these puzzles – I certainly hope so! Beautifully made using Padauk, Wenge, Acacia and Maple, the initial challenge is to separate the pieces from their travel assembly. Maybe I’m not very good at puzzles (it does say that all over my website) but I actually took a good 5 minutes taking it apart. Then obviously you have to assemble them into a 4x4x4 cube using linear moves only. Many puzzlers have moved away from solely linear interlocking puzzles but I still love the standard interlocking puzzles that I first learned about so many years ago from Richard Gain. They provide a wonderful challenge and can be quite tough. This one is absolutely superb. 

From the beginning it is very easy to establish the positions of the 4 pieces but actually assembling them is a tremendous fun challenge. Working out which pieces to use first and which subsequently get inserted is part of the difficulty. There is no obvious order when looking at the shapes and in fact the required order was a bit of a surprise to me. At first it’s possible to place any 3 pieces in a promising arrangement but the final one ain’t going nowhere! I spent a good 45 minutes trying various arrangements of the first 2/3 pieces before I found a sequence that looked promising – something worthy of Girish’ design skills. Once I’d found this start, I thought I was making progress until miraculously a piece fell out unexpectedly – I sort of lost track of what I was doing and ended up back at the beginning. Start again…

Continuing in my search I noticed a possible move that I had missed the first time and that opened up a whole set of dance moves of the pieces in an out around each other. The Pelikan team have made this beautifully tight so the pieces don’t flop about and each move has to be made deliberately with the occasional “thwack” as they settle in to place. I had my cube assembled in about an hour. 

Having taken my photos, I then struggled to dismantle the puzzle and put it back into the storage/travel position. It’s a disassembly challenge as well as an assembly one. I redid it a few hours later and even though I remembered the vague order of the pieces, it still took me quite a while to repeat the process. This is another masterpiece of design and manufacture by Girish and Pelikan. If you like interlocking puzzles then this should be high on your shopping list.”