I turned my WORST 3x3 into a Speedcube

hey guys and welcome back to z3 cubing today i'm going to take the very worst 3x3 in my collection and transform it into an actual speedcube [Music] alright so let's have a look at what i would consider my worst 3x3 now this is actually a puzzle that you might recognize from a really old video that has somehow become the most popular one on my channel which is called my top 5 worst rubik's cubes and basically i use this as the example of my worst 3x3 possible so it's a really cheap cube itself it turns really terribly and all of the stickers have fallen off as you can see these are the few ones that i've actually stayed on so my goal today is to take this cube which is undoubtedly the very worst one in my collection i think the sticker stands for number one worst cube and try and make it turn as good as possible as you can see i am very optimistic with my title i want to be able to speedcube with this cube i average around 15 seconds so i think if i can solve it in under 20 i will be happy now you may be thinking like yeah sure all the stickers are falling off but surely it can't be that bad but no this thing really is worse than it looks i'd call it a dollar store cube but i think that would be vastly overstating its quality this thing was probably produced for five cents and if you paid a dollar for it you would be getting ripped off i mean let's have a look at the mechanism so as you can see this is the thinnest plastic imaginable that is the minimum plastic you can get to have a functional 3x3 same thing with the corners that is that's not even symmetrical look at how ridiculous that is the entire core is made of plastic and you basically have these little clips that go into the center pieces to make them spin rather than screws and springs so needless to say this cube is absolutely terrible again even the stickers are telling you number one worst 2x3 in my collection so today i'm gonna do any and everything i can do to fix it so normally the first step to a mod like this would be to use a knife and take off all the stickers but it seems like the cube has kind of taken care of that for us this time so looks like it will take us about five seconds to get those two off and now the cube is unstickered that was fast now i do intend to put some nicer stickers back on the cube later in fact i have some very fast looking stickers to go along with it but for now i'm just going to leave it un-stickered for the rest of the mods next step is to take apart the cube and we're actually going to deal with this core so i alluded to the core being really terrible and awful earlier but let's just take a look at that ourselves so here we have the core and of course just because of the way that a 3x3 works this is always going to end up being the most complicated part of the mechanism because you have to have these six individual pieces that can all spin freely to hold everything else together and i think if we just push on one of these center pieces we can get a center cap off and there we go there is the clip itself that is all that is holding these center pieces on and honestly we do not need that we can just pull it off we are straight up going to be replacing the core because this one is just so terrible oh that's interesting there's a screw here i actually did not know there are screws okay so it seems like we have these kind of clippy things on these four sides and then we have screws on the other two sides there's nothing even to screw into it's just the screw head itself is holding the piece barely on there by like a half a millimeter there we go these two tiny screws are probably the most expensive part of this entire cube so basically we're just gonna get rid of this core itself get rid of these screws we do not need those anymore so we're just gonna make up our own mechanism to work with these centerpieces now a common trend among all cubes that cost more than a dollar or aren't made by rubik's is that they have a bit of springiness to them that's because of course they have a spring in each center piece which kind of allows some elasticity it allows a bit of flex as you're turning the sides which allows them to turn way better than this cube so i think the lack of springs is actually the biggest reason that this cube turned so bad other than just the horrible plastic quality itself i mean you can tell because there's these little black specks so on a normal cube you put the screw in the spring together you'd grab a center piece stick it on through and then you'd screw it into the core like this easy as that right well no because the hole on the center piece is actually way too big so as you can see if we would screw this in here the spring isn't actually doing anything because it's just kind of hanging out in space there so instead i devised a plan and i made a little bit of an adapter this is a little 3d printed part that basically has a hole just big enough for a screw and a spring and it has a bigger part that sticks right through the hole in the center piece so as you can see it takes a giant opening that the original mechanism used and converts it into something more like a normal 3x3 that a normal screw-in spring can fit into so now what we can do is take the screw and the spring and just set it in there just like you would on a normal cube and now we can screw it into the core just like normal and it will look just kind of like a normal 3x3 centerpiece so we'll go ahead and go around the cube and repeat that with all the rest of this in our pieces all right just finishing that up there with the last few centers and here is the result so as you can see it looks a little bit funny because everything is kind of falling into the center here but once we have everything all pulled apart by the pieces it should work just fine so let's go ahead and assemble the puzzle here real quick and then we can go ahead and take a look and do some first turns on our newly springified 2x3 all right now of course this was only the first of many mods that we're going to be doing on this cube to make it better let's go ahead and see how good it turns right now and i thought this might be a little bit too tight but i think it is good because we're going to have problems with popping no matter what just because of the nature of how thin these pieces are but yeah this is a huge improvement the springiness of it really does make a huge difference it actually does give it a surprising amount of forwards corner cutting as you can see it just cuts that corner super easily the big problem now is actually backwards corner cutting because as you can see if we try and cut even the tiniest little bit backwards everything just catches on each other and it becomes a huge lucky mess the cube is barely barely misaligned but it's causing this giant lockup now of course the solution to this on a modern cube is just to round off all the pieces as you can see there's so many little curves inside of the pieces of a cube like this which allows for amazing backwards corner cutting that is just non-existent on this cube so of course our next step on this cube is going to be to round off all the corners as much as we possibly can and we're going to do that with some sandpaper so basically we're going to take a look at all of these little sharp edges on all these pieces and just get a piece of sandpaper like this and sand them down as much as possible now the limiting factor will be just the thickness of the plastic as you can see if i cut off any more the plastic is just going to give in on itself because it's just so thin but yeah i'm going to sand it down as much as i possibly can smooth it out with a bit of a lighter sandpaper like this and go ahead and get everything as smooth down as possible now i'm not going to be filming it because it makes such a mess that i don't want to do it here on my table but i'm gonna go ahead and take this cube apart sand down all the edges and get that cue once everything's smooth all right it is many many hours later now and our cube now looks like this we went from a super squared off blocky design to something that looks a little bit more like a modern speedcube and as you can see it turns quite a bit better too we still do have to be pretty careful about popping i actually have the cube still pretty tight but other than that this thing now turns pretty well as you can see we still have a decent bit of forwards corner cutting like we had before but now it also backwards corner cuts just a little bit not a whole lot but as you can see if we do a turn like that it still will turn whereas before it just totally locked up so this is of course the same cube as you can see all those cheapo little pieces and by the way that's why it pops so much just because these little tiny arms that are holding the pieces into the puzzle are just so small there's nothing we can do to get around that it's just something we have to deal with but yeah as you can see on all the corner pieces there's these three sides right here that i rounded all down i basically got some rough sandpaper and got the rough shape of it right and then i got some finer sandpaper and just smooth everything out inside of there and i did the same thing on the edges of course there are four sides on each of these edges that need to be smoothed out as well as of course four sides on each of the center pieces so i did that on all the pieces it took forever and then i also put some vaseline inside of the puzzle to kind of smooth everything out again basically putting vaseline in the puzzle and then just turning it a whole bunch acts as kind of like a third even finer layer of sandpaper around everything just to make everything even more smooth and so now it pretty much feels like a finished puzzle on the inside so after washing out all the vaseline because of course we don't want it in the final puzzle which took forever by the way it's now time to add some real lubricants to this 2x3 so i have a number of different types of lubricants that i want to try out basically i'm going for a kind of fast lubricant because right now it feels just kind of slow i need to be able to flick it and just be able to do a nice turn that just takes way too much force right now so i have lubrical silk right now which is kind of my favorite this will make it a little bit faster and kind of smooth things out dnm37 if we need things to get faster as well as max fleet these are just two really fast piece lubes that i'm going to try later i'm going to start out with lubicle silk though but before we even get to that there still is one thing that needs to be lubed which is the core so i need to lube basically all the screws and springs and everything and because that takes a little bit longer and you guys don't want to watch it in real time i'm just going to take apart this cube right now lubricate all the core and then i'll get back to you i'm using max command by the way which is a pretty decent core lube all right i just finished lubing the core let's see if that impacts the performance because sometimes it can a little bit and yeah that might be a little bit better just because there's not so much friction inside those center pieces but not a big difference let's get on to the real lubes and put these center caps back on so like i said let's first try out some lubrical silk so let's just open this bottle up here let's reach into the cube like this and drop maybe one or two drops in right there and maybe do the same thing on the other side of the cube just one maybe one and a half drops doesn't come out super quickly but there we go now let's go ahead and try out the cube now one other unexpected issue i'm coming across as i try and push the performance of this cube to its maximum is just the hollowness of the pieces so if we take a look at every edge in every corner it kind of has a hollow section on one of the sides like this where it's just kind of nothingness and so as the pieces kind of slide against each other they can kind of get stuck in each other like this and so now that i'm just turning the cube around like this now that we've solved most of the issues that's kind of what i'm feeling i'm feeling a little bit of lockups just on the inside of those hollow parts kind of catching on each other and just like the popping which i'm also being very careful to prevent because if i just do this it will definitely pop that's something that we just cannot prevent and we just have to live with it all right now what i think we need is a bit more speed because even though this cube is super smooth as we're just turning it like this it still isn't super fast like if we just do a flick it still takes quite a lot of force so i'm trying to choose between dnm37 which is kind of more watery and max fleet which is kind of this cool non-newtonian lube i think i'm actually going to go with this one because it's kind of new and interesting and cool and we'll put some in there and then we'll go around to the other side of the cube and put a little bit in that side too let's get all that off it's kind of hard to get off the end of the syringe but there we go now we can kind of break it in and yeah that is definitely fast now i'd like to say it feels awesome and don't get me wrong it definitely does feel amazing compared to how it felt like in the beginning but the turning of it is still definitely pretty awkward everything is just a little bit catchy because of that hollowness of the pieces i was talking about and it definitely does pop if you do too much force on it but either way i think we've done a really good job on this so i think the only thing left is to get some stickers on this cube so that we can actually do a speed solve and try out the performance for real [Music] all right let's check this thing out you know putting game stickers on this just makes it look fast now we have to keep in mind that this is still the cheaper than dollar store cube that we started with as you can see still the absolute minimum mechanism down inside of there but as you can see it still turns decently i mean i can do an algorithm on it in faster than i could before that's for sure it's really not the speed of this cube or the corner cutting or anything that's slowing me down it's really just how fragile this thing is if you were to hold it in your hands you would just be able to feel that this thing is hardly holding together and again that's just the limitation of the mechanism this is the best that we could do but yeah if you just kind of pull on a piece at all it'll just come out now it's time for the ultimate test on this cube and that is to do a real 3x3 speed solve so i'm just going to start and stop this time wrap on my phone to generate a brand new random scramble i'm going to do that scramble on this cube and then try and solve it as fast as possible now like i mentioned earlier i think if i can solve this cube in less than 20 seconds then i am happy enough to call it an official speed cube so let's get this scrambled up here start some inspection and go ahead and try it all right i think i know what i'm going to do here so i'm going to start in three two one and go [Music] oh pll skip 20.31 that's so close okay i'm gonna be honest with you guys i have been trying this for over an hour this is by far my best time yet and i am not going any later it's like 10 p.m right now i've been going at this for so long my hands are shaking and sweating at that solve but yeah i'm gonna call this a speed cube because i got a 20 second solve on it i don't care about what past me said 20 seconds is good enough anyway yeah obviously this cube is extremely limited just because of the cheapness of the mechanism like this is just the bare minimum amount of plastic you can possibly get for a cube to work but i think we did very well considering what we had to work with and actually i have done a similar project in the past with a rubik's brand cube which is a similarly bad cube but it has much more substantial pieces on the inside so it still does pop a little bit but it actually does turn a lot better as you can see i can actually do real algorithms and turn confidently with it i think the biggest differences between these two is that there's more high quality plastic on the inside of this one even if the mechanism is equally bad plus these corner pieces don't have little hollowed out sections which makes it a whole lot more stable so if you want to watch the video that i made on this one oh yeah by the way it has magnets which is pretty cool then go ahead and click in the little box up above i pretty much did all the exact same modifications on this cube as i did on this very terrible one the biggest difference being that this cube just started out a whole lot worse to begin with anyway i hope you guys enjoyed this video i definitely enjoyed making it except for that hour of trying to solve it in less than 20 seconds that wasn't so much fun but i'm really happy with this result i'm really surprised that i was able to take my worst cube and turn it into well still honestly one of my worst cubes but at least i can sort of speed solve with it anyway that's pretty much it for this video and i'll see you guys next time [Music] you

Channel: Z3Cubing

Views: 1,410,905

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

Id: XWWc586MSXs

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020