I made the world's LIGHTEST *2x2*

hey guys and welcome back to Z3 cubing today I'm going to create the world's lightest 2x2 [Music] this is the world's latest 3x3 Rubik's Cube coming in at just 26 grams except for this one that's made out of paper and weighs just 10 grams or this one that weighs just one gram except I think it's kind of cheating to call something the lightest 3x3 just because it's really small so I think we should narrow our definition down to the lightest standard size 3x3 and while this paper cube is pretty cool being made out of paper means it is infinitely more fragile not to mention way more difficult to turn than its plastic counterpart that's why I also like to narrow things down to the realm of just plastic cubes now with those requirements in mind it got me thinking if the lightest three by three we can make is 26 grams then what about the lightest two by two this is a relatively lightweight 2x2 Speed Cube from Gan coming in at just 56 grams so surely we'd be able to modify this to be under 26 grams right well maybe but it's not quite that simple of course that is how I made the lightest 2x3 was by taking a standard Speed Cube and just cutting a bunch of holes in it until I had removed most of the plastic now unfortunately I don't think this technique would be nearly as effective on a 2x2 even though it's a smaller Cube that looks a little bit simpler on the inside the mechanism is actually just as complicated if not more so than on a 3X3 and that means there's a lot of little hidden pieces that you really can't save much weight just by poking holes into at least without compromising the mechanism to prove that point here's what the core of this exact 2x2 looks like now we could probably shave off a little bit of weight like by removing the magnets but for the most part we're stuck with this entire thing if we want the cube to still function and on its own the core of this 2x2 weighs over 21 Grams that means by the time we add on all these outer pieces but the holes in them the cube will probably weigh upwards of 30 or 40 grams which is just way too heavy so if we want to make the world's lightest 2x2 we're gonna have to come up with a new strategy now on my video about this Cube I got a lot of comments asking why didn't you just 3D print the pieces it'd be a lot less manual labor and you could probably make the pieces even lighter now at the time I was pretty hesitant I had done a lot of 3D printing before and I was pretty confident that it would be impossible to make pieces this thin and intricate at least on a standard household 3D printer now I stand behind my statement and I still believe that modding was the way to go for the world's lightest 3x3 and not 3D printing at least unless you have a really fancy 3D printer but I think for the world's lightest two by two 3D printing might actually be able to solve some of our problems now we've already established that the core of a standard size 2x2 is way too big and heavy for our needs so what if we just started with a smaller 2x2 of course this little cube is already a lot lighter than this big one but keep in mind the requirement that our world's lightest 2x2 has to be the same size as a standard one and by the way that standard size is around 50 millimeters so that'll be our minimum goal so what is the core of this little mini 2x2 look like well if you remove all the outer corner pieces this is what you get you can think of this mechanism kind of just like a 3X3 we have these circular centers these flat edges and then the only thing you can actually see on the final cube is what's attached to these big corners on the outside so this little tiny thing in my hands makes for a fully functional 2x2 and the best part is it only weighs just over four grams that is nothing compared to a standard 2x2 core so here's my I plan to make the world's latest 2x2 start with a super lightweight 2x2 core and then expand it out with some really lightweight plastic pieces until we reach that magic 50 millimeters and what better way to make plastic extensions in a very specific shape than with 3D printing keep in mind the big difference from last time is that we're not actually printing the mechanism we already have it right here that's why this time we don't have to worry about printing really intricate pieces or the plastic not being strong enough we have all the intricate precise stuff right here we're basically just going to build a facade on top of it to get it up to the correct size and so I started 3D modeling and printing some prototypes so this was my first attempt right here basically this is like one sticker of the cube you would have four of them per side glued on right here here here and here so you can see I've made it completely Hollow to minimize the amount of plastic with just enough surface area on the outer face to be able to hold on to the puzzle and by doing it just one sticker at a time rather than the entire piece which would be made up of three of these we can actually print in six different colors of filament and then basically glue three of these together to make one piece and basically end up with a stickerless design now because you're gluing three of these together you actually don't need all these supports in fact you can get rid of three of these big arms and just leave this one little one to hold up this Square here and so I went ahead and printed a bunch more prototypes to try and get something along these lines I had a lot of problems with printing as you can see here but eventually I came up with this design which for some reason consistently printed the best out of all of them so this became the final version of the design and I started printing out a bunch more copies later on I realized there are a few more spots where I could remove a bit more plastic so I just did that with a knife and eventually I created my first full extended 2x2 piece as you can see three of these glued together gives you this so hopefully if you didn't understand it before you can now see how a bunch of these pieces will eventually build up the scaffolding of a full size 2x2 of course each piece will have three different colors on it instead of just all being white it'll be like white and then red and then green and so in order to print in all the different colors of a Rubik's Cube I went ahead and bought an assorted set of a bunch of different colors of 3D printing filament from Amazon and then I chose out that the six colors that look most like a Rubik's Cube as you can see right here so with the filament and the designs in hand let's go ahead and start the 3D printing time lapse [Music] so after almost eight hours of closely monitoring and messing with the printer here are the results I will say I've never printed in Rubik's Cube colored plastic before and I love the way it looks all these colors together so now what we have to do is take all 24 of these and turn them into these basically what that entails is peeling them all off of these rafts which basically just help everything stick to the 3D printer bed a little bit better and then removing all the supports which basically does help things print properly when those overhangs and then we can do the painstaking part of taking a knife and cutting down all that excess plastic to get it to the very minimal design that we have right here so let's go ahead and start the time lapse [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] so here are all the cut down pieces I still have one more spot where I want to remove a bit more extra plastic but we're gonna wait to do that until after the next step which is breaking out the super glue and gluing the pieces together basically we just grabbed three matching pieces like these put Super Glue on all of these 45 degree angles where they touch and then glue them together into one big corner piece like this and then once we have all these combinations of corner pieces glued together I'm going to do that a little bit of extra cutting I was talking about earlier and then we can glue each one onto the core of our two by two just like this prototype one right here and after that our full size 2x2 should hopefully be complete I'm still not certain that all the pieces will fit together properly around the core and we'll have to wait and see if the cube actually still turns properly but I'm crossing my fingers and hopefully it turns out to be incredibly light so let's start the final time lapse [Music] foreign [Music] all right and here is the result now I don't know about you but as I was putting this together I was just blown away at how good it looks of course I have the arguably more impressive 3x3 to compare it to but something about the Simplicity of this one especially with the black core that all the corners are just holding onto just makes it look really cool of course it was not without its challenges and if you add up all the time I spent designing pieces and actively tending to the 3D printer and of course cutting everything down to make it functional and pretty I'm sure it far exceeds the 12 hours I spent modding this Cube I guess the biggest challenge I had was after gluing together all the corner pieces I realized they were ever so slightly too big to fit together while glued onto the core and so I spent another hour or two off camera just carefully sanding down all the sides of every piece which I guess does make it a little bit lighter but it was a lot of work and now everything looks a little bit more crooked than it used to and I won't get into the other challenges like how I accidentally set it on fire a couple times but let's just say I put a lot of effort into making it look good but of course looks are not everything the cube still has to be fully functional and is it well it seems to turn just fine in every layer and I'm actually pretty impressed with the way it turns I was a little bit worried because the 2x2 I started with is a little bit catchy and yeah this thing isn't going to set any Corner cutting records but I will say that if anything adding the extensions actually made the cube turn a little bit better it almost lets you align the layers a little bit more precisely I also added a drop of lubical silk and I think that helped it out a little bit too so now that the cube is all scrambled up let's go ahead and try a quick solve so three two one and go I will say that the skeletal nature of the pieces means that it can be a little bit tricky to turn and that combined with the poor turning of the original Cube means that this thing isn't exactly a Speed Cube but at the same time it works perfectly fine for a casual solve also I just accidentally did CLL oops I'll also say that I was pleasantly surprised at how sturdy these pieces felt especially after gluing the three colors of each one together and so I was ultimately able to cut down these thin sections to be even thinner than I originally thought saving a bit more weight so I guess 3D printing is actually a bit more feasible than I thought as a way to produce puzzles at least in terms of strength I would still be very concerned about producing the intricate details like in a 3X3 mechanism at least on the cheap 3D printer that I use but perhaps I'll be more open to making more cool 3D printed stuff like this in the future but I know there's still one more burning question on all of your minds how much does it weigh well first let's make sure it meets all the other requirements for the world's latest 2x2 you've already seen that it's fully functional it's made out of plastic the plastic core plus the 3D printed pieces and it is the same size as a normal 2x2 as you can see here it's pretty much exactly 50 inches as you can see so let's break out the scale and see how much it weighs just to remind you a normal 2x2 weighs 57 grams and the world's light is 3x3 weighs just 26 whereas the world's lightest 2x2 comes in at just 13 grams yes that is basically half of the world's lightest 3x3 I really could not be happier with this weight this one really just feels like a feather even compared to the 3X3 here is the equivalent in tungsten cubes in fact these three little cubes weigh more than this entire fully functional 2x2 even compared to the little tiny 2x2 we started with there's only about a 5 gram difference ends despite adding on all this 3D printed plastic and making it so much bigger than this one is so yeah I believe this is now the world's lightest 2x2 at least according to those pretty straightforward requirements and it makes a great companion alongside my world's lightest 3x3 here so yeah I hope you all enjoyed the process of making this fun Cube and stay tuned for more like it in the future how about the world's heaviest 2x2 that's pretty much it and I'll see you guys next time [Music] thank you

Channel: Z3Cubing

Views: 649,711

Keywords: rubiks cube, rubiks, cube, cubing, cubes, puzzle, puzzle cube, magic puzzle, magic cube

Id: MZQGOLQq4Mg

Length: 10min 53sec (653 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 07 2023