Let's Make a Tetraminx!

hey guys and welcome back to Z3 cubing today I'm going to take a pyraminx and turn it into a Tetra mix [Music] I have a lot of pyraminxes but I can still vividly remember my very first one the Shang Xiao I used to do this fun little 10 second mod and take off all the tips making it look like a totally different puzzle there we go a non-cuber might not even recognize this as a pyraminx but the tips are so useless in the first place that it basically solves in exactly the same way there is a name for this little puzzle the tetraminx but hardly anyone ever sells them because it just functions so similar to the pyraminx but I figured with such a big Cube collection it's kind of a shame that I don't have a dedicated tetramings myself so I figured today we might as well go ahead and solve that problem and make one but let's back up a minute because didn't I just make a tetraminx like 30 seconds ago well yes but this isn't a real tetraminx this is really just a pyraminx with the tips removed and because of that you still have these little black plastic things that normally just hold the tips on but of course they're more than just holders for the tips on older pyraminxes you also have these little notches for the ball bearing so that the tip can snap into place on newer pyraminxes this would be done with magnets and of course you also have the all-important screws and springs which are literally holding the entire puzzle together so what I'm saying is that making a tetraminx is a lot harder than you think you can't just chop up this piece of plastic slap on a sticker and call it a day now well over five years ago I actually made a tutorial on how to make a tetraminx out of a shangshao pyraminx this exact type right here and that was because I was making a pyraminx barrel which of course doesn't have any tips which means it's actually more of a tetraming sparrow so that means I had to get rid of these pieces of plastic just as a starting point for the barrel so I could just go through and follow my own tutorial and make a tetraminx right out of the shankshaft pyraminx here but this was my very first pyraminx and there is no way that I'm modding it now in fact I'm not even gonna mod any of my own pyraminxes I'm going to mod someone else's that's right I stole someone's pyraminx and now I'm going to mod it but it's okay though because I stole it with good intentions this was a friend of mine's pyraminx he lost a couple of the tips to it he showed it to me and I took it thinking that I would go ahead and buy some Replacements I tried to order some replacement parts but none of the stores had this particular model so then I was just stuck with someone else's broken pyraminx so I figure it's kind of a lost cause at this point to try and find replacement tips so I figured this would be a good candidate to just remove the tips altogether and Tyler if you're watching this let me know I'd be happy to buy you a new pyraminx this puzzle is going to cause us a few problems later because it is stickerless it's actually a lot easier to make a nice looking tetraminx out of a sticker puzzle but we'll have to deal with that later for the time being the first and most important challenge to solve is just figuring out how to remove these little white pieces I think the best way to do that is to unscrew one side and just see what we have to work with okay here we go let's have a look so you can see that little ball bearing there which snaps into one of these three little holes which is how you get the clicking mechanism but we shouldn't have to worry about that we can just remove it here's the screw and spring which holds the Cube together and gives its elasticity so that's very important now these default screws are very long as you can see earlier they stuck out of the puzzle about this much and so if we want to have a flat surface at the end we're definitely going to need some shorter screws but luckily I have plenty of extra screws here's just a random set for a 3X3 so we can very easily swap these out now of course it's never going to be as easy as just swapping out one screw with another but let's go ahead and try it out and see what happens first I definitely want to look inside of the centerpiece and see what we're working with so it seems like there's just a little hole down in the middle there and if we go ahead and stick the screw into that hole it seems like it does stick out just enough to be able to screw into the core and have just a little bit of extra Flex so who knows maybe it really is this easy let's go ahead and try it out on all four sides and see what happens [Music] okay I stand by my original statement it's not quite as easy as just swapping out the screws and that's because this cube is incredibly tight and it still pops now you might think that's a weird combination but there's actually a very good reason for it basically the springs that came with this Cube are very strong which means that they clamp down very tightly making it unpleasant to turn but they're also quite long which means you still have a lot of room for the puzzle to flex and for the pieces to pop out now the way they deal with this in the original puzzle is actually kind of clever in fact they do this in almost every single puzzle with a traditional screw and spring but you might not have ever noticed it basically if you look down inside any centerpiece like this you'll see two little Rings one of them is at the very bottom like right down here and that keeps the spring from falling out but there's also another one up here which actually keeps the screw from going in too far if we just drop this screw in without the spring it's not gonna fall all the way down here where that spring holder is it's actually only going to go about to here sitting right on top of that first little lip as you can see it's not going to fall all the way down here the head of the screw is going to stay all the way up there and that serves as a limit for how far the spring is allowed to stretch of course if there were a spring in there it would kind of spring out up to here and then as you pull the puzzle down it only spring a little bit only about that far in contrast what we've done on this puzzle now is kind of like removing that little lip so the screw is allowed to travel as far down as it wants to and compress the spring as much as it wants and that leads to that very awkward feeling as we're returning now what I did on my original tetramings is I actually just cut this piece up leaving just this Barrel part here which still had the little lip on it which I inserted underneath the screen spring so the spring could not stretch all the way and that eliminated the popping and if that sounds a little bit complicated well yeah it kind of is it involves getting a Dremel out and all that and I really don't want to deal with that right now so my idea is what if we just use a much weaker spring and then we just tighten the screw a little bit more it's not quite ideal but it should solve all those problems we were facing so unless I'm overlooking something it should work let's go ahead and try it out so it seems like we've solved one problem but the other one Still Remains we definitely solve the weird tightness issue but we still have a lot of bad popping I've tightened down all the screws literally as tight as they will possibly go and it's still not tight enough so at this point we have a couple options we can either find some shorter screws or shorten these ones with a Dremel which I really don't want to do or we can just take the lazy way out and add a whole bunch of washers to make it as if the screws were shorter I'm definitely going to take the ladder option because adding washers is a heck of a lot easier than shortening screws the only question is how many washers to add to each side I'm going to guess maybe three or four so let's see what happens oh and while we're here I absolutely despise non-revable Cube logos so I'm going to use the tried and true method of rubbing a bunch of sugar on it until it comes off let's get started foreign I think that did it with those washers in I tightened it down all the way again and I think that gives just the perfect balance of performance and also not popping of course it's still not perfectly ideal for the Springs to just be compressing all the way you would still need some sort of little plastic holder to fix that but I think just having relatively weak Springs does the trick so we can finally move on to the finishing touches making these sides look nice and pretty now this is what I meant when I said it would be tricky because we have a stickerless puzzle If This Were a stickered puzzle then this entire face would just be black we could slap a sticker on over the hole and we'd be perfect but because the stickerless colors on each side expand onto these extra faces that we just created it's gonna look very weird if we just put a sticker over top the borders around the sticker instead of being black are going to be all multi-colored and I think that's going to look very weird instead I have another idea in my head that I think will turn out looking a lot better it's actually pretty simple basically what I'm going to do is paint that border black so basically if you look at any of the normal sizes of the puzzle it's still going to look perfectly stickerless whereas if you look head on to one of the tips it's going to look like a black sticker puzzle and I think that combination of stickerless and black is actually going to look pretty cool so basically what I'm going to do is take some painters tape finally using it for what it was intended and just tape off all the sections that I don't want to be painted so I'm just going to leave it like this so that just the tip will end up black so let's go ahead and tape this thing off and then slap on some spray paint [Music] so here it is I let the paint dry for about 24 hours so let's go ahead and unwrap it and check it out I did put some pieces of tape over the little holes just to make sure that no paint got into there and obviously the goal is that the whole inside stickerless part of the puzzle remains unpainted so it looks like we did a pretty good job here unfortunately my bottle of black spray paint is finally starting to run out so the application was a little bit splotchy but overall I think it should work out just fine there we go so it might look a little bit strange at the moment especially with all these holes on the black sides but I think once we get the stickers on over them it should look perfectly fine but now I think it's time for the final design decision which is how we're going to put on the stickers I've seen some tetraminxes where basically each one of these sides just has one of the adjacent colors it's like this one might be red this one might be green this one might be blue but I don't like how you're arbitrarily choosing which sticker goes on which side plus I think it might look a little bit weird if our sticker shades are slightly different than the stickerless shades like having a light blue next to a dark blue would just look super weird and so instead I'm gonna go with in my opinion the best sticker scheme which I think is what I did last time which is just each one of these sides holding its opposite color so for example this side right here would have blue on it this side right here would have yellow on it I think this clear scheme will look the best because each one of these center pieces will have all four colors on it and it'll be a lot harder to notice any inconsistencies in Shades now what exact sticker shades are we going to use well I still have these pyraminx tips left over from the shangsha pyraminx that I used to make my very first tetraminx as well as the pyraminx barrel and so I thought it would only be appropriate if we use these original shangshao stickers and as an added bonus I know that these stickers are a little bit thicker than your average stickers so I should help make this hole a little bit less noticeable let's go ahead and put these stickers on and there we go what do you think I imagine this will probably be a pretty polarizing design some people love it some people will hate it but as for me I mean it is pretty much exactly what I had in mind and I think it looks pretty cool it really does look pretty convincingly like you just superimpose these four faces from a black sticker Cube onto a stickerless tetraminx and if anything the look is quite unique the paint application isn't quite perfect like I said it's a little bit splotchy and some of these edges aren't super clean I guess that's down to my taping skills though and if I were to make one change it would probably be some slightly bigger stickers to match this size of this piece a little bit better because there is a lot of black showing right now but overall I do quite like the look of it anyway let's go ahead and get it scrambled up and maybe do a quick solve if you want to deal with the terrible tips of a pyraminx it'll be great okay I was about to give a big speech about how I'm finally using L4 e but this is the perfect one flip scramble so I'm just gonna use one flip three two one and go my pyraminx finger tricking is definitely not great but here we go there we go no tips to deal with that was nice and easy now obviously if you already own a pyraminx there's really no practical point in making one of these I mean just take the tips off your pyraminx the stickers don't really serve any purpose anyways and if you do decide to make one definitely go with the stickered pyraminx it'll make your life a lot easier but as a collector I mean I definitely wanted to have a tetraminx and having one as unique as this I kind of like it so yeah I hope you enjoyed going through this journey with me of making such a unique puzzle and definitely let me know down in the comments if you want to see more like this in the future anyway that's pretty much it and I'll see you guys next time [Music] thank you

Channel: Z3Cubing

Views: 989,915

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

Id: JzArI-lyaoA

Length: 10min 23sec (623 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 05 2022