“Alma has been made using Maple, Purpleheart and Wenge. It would seem that no Pelikan release is complete without something wonderful from Alfons Eyckmans. He designs burr puzzles that are both beautiful and interesting to solve. The Alma looks like a very complex construction but is actually just a 6 piece burr made from L shaped plates. I cannot resist Alfons’ burrs – there is always something fun to explore and this is no different. The pathway to the removal of the first piece is fairly well hidden but there are only a few relatively short blind pathways to get lost in and the removal of the first piece takes a fun 10 moves. After this it remains quite a stable construction (just a slight tendency for one piece to sag) and then another 4 moves to remove the next. Having disassembled this over about an hour, I scrambled the pieces and left them for a while before attempting a reassembly. I thought that I had a reasonable memory of the process but somehow got stuck and kept going round and around in circles with one of the pieces continually being trivial to remove and not being interlocked as it should. It took me another hour to realise what I was doing wrong and get it back together. I definitely think that for the more advanced burr puzzler there is plenty of scope for this to be an assembly puzzle and for the “normal” ones amongst us (are any of us that normal?) this is a fun one to partially memorise and then work on the assembly from that. Of course entry of the pieces into Burrtools is also part of the fun.”
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