L’Escargot

Designer: Jorgos Anastasou

This puzzle measures: 133 mm x 83 mm x 83 mm

Material – variants:

• Walnut, Ash, Zebrano
• Walnut, Ash, Limba Frake

Jorgos Anastasou wrote about it: 

“A humble creature and so beautifully crafted, with a perfectly constructed shell and amazing movement capabilities on any surface! These were the criteria that made me design this puzzle. It wasn’t easy because of its structure but it was finally done and the result was worth the effort. And thanks to Pelikan and Jakub it became a real puzzle that is not only interesting to solve but also very beautiful to look at! Have fun!”

Kevin Sadler wrote about it:

“This is the second puzzle for Jorgos Anastasou and is a wonderful animal shaped burr. We have a wonderful snail which is asymmetric, like the delicious escargot we can eat. This is different to Pelikan’s earlier snail puzzle of their own design which is more of a sequential assembly/disassembly puzzle. 

Pelikan have made this with a wonderful smooth and tactile Walnut and Zebrano shell and an Ash body (there are some Wenge eyes too).

Obviously, the aim is to dismantle it and then reassemble it. Of course, the next part of the fun is creating your own Burrtools file for it as well. Maybe you can manage the reassembly before the BT file? The disassembly is a fun sequence of moving parts of the shell as well as the body around and gradually you can see an opening come into play which will allow the first piece to be removed. Even after removing the first piece it is still a challenge to remove the next and then the others are much simpler. The disassembly sequence is a perfect level 14.11.4.3 giving you some rather complex looking pieces.

I actually managed to keep the pieces in a reasonable orientation and position to be able to reassemble without resorting to a BT file but I doubt I could do it if I had scrambled the pieces. I am sure that all of you would easily manage to do it though.”