These Rubik's Cubes are 100% LEGO, and Turn GREAT!

hey guys and welcome back to z3 cubing today i'm going to show you my brand new rubik's cube made out of nothing but lego no okay guys we have a problem my fully functional lego rubik's cube well it's not exactly all that functional let me bring you up to speed i have always loved lego cubes and by that i usually mean a rubik's cube with legos glued onto the outside that was until earlier this year when i got an email from a youtuber named puzzle telling me about his normal sized fully functional rubik's cube made out of nothing but unmodified official lego pieces not only on the outside but also on the inside i got as far as making a checkerboard pattern after 30 minutes before i put it in a box and gave up on it forever fortunately puzzle commented on my video promising a better mechanism in the future and sure enough a few months later he delivered with not one but two vastly improved designs when i watched that first video i was amazed at how much he was able to improve the cube and when i watched that second video i was again amazed at how much he was able to improve it so today i'm gonna walk you through the whole experience building not just one but both hugely improved lego cubes so that hopefully by the end of this video i will become one of the very first people after puzzling himself to actually solve a fully lego rubik's cube let's get into it now of course the first step in making any lego cube is buying a whole bunch of legos you can tell just how much he improved his design just by how many extra pieces i had to buy to upgrade this one i got all of these by the way from a site called bricklink which lets you choose exactly all the different pieces that you want and then it can automatically tell you what combination of sellers you have to buy from to get all of your pieces at the best price it's actually pretty cool unfortunately i did have to compromise a little bit on my color scheme i couldn't find these two pieces in light gray so sad anyway let's go ahead and get these all opened up and then i'll walk you through each type of piece the core the corners and the edges and show you exactly what has changed and improved first up the core this piece wasn't so much a problem for the turning as it was just really annoying to deal with i will say though that it is a really genius mechanism having these six little things sticking out and each center piece being able to rotate really around it and so for that reason he hasn't really had to change a whole lot the annoying thing though is that you had to slide in these center stocks just the perfect amount not too little not too much so you see there's a little tiny gap there and if we push just a little bit too much they'll slide in like that and the cube will no longer be functional now the solution to this problem is just to take off all the center pieces and replace this little part with a little stud with one of these parts with a much bigger stud that way you can put it back onto the center piece like this and just slide it all the way in there and there's no need to worry about how far you push it in except that this big central core piece is kind of weird and asymmetrical which made it really difficult to line it up on this axis so we're going to also replace that with a much more symmetrical version so let's slide this bar through here to make the six-sided core and then put all of these onto the center pieces and apply those all to the core and there we go the core is already complete and i can already tell this feels a whole lot sturdier than the old one did and the best part is that you can actually push down on the opposite centers to make sure that they're tight which may not sound like a lot but that's going to be a huge help as we're assembling it next up the corner pieces these ones haven't changed a whole lot but what we are going to change are these two little one by one bricks that we were using these ones have studs on all four sides we're gonna swap those out for ones with studs on just two different sides so like this and like this and then also instead of putting these circular tiles on the outer one we're gonna use these square tiles because apparently the squares fit better there we go we're also gonna replace this one by one plate with this one by two plate before sticking that onto the corner piece just like this now we'll throw in an extra one by one right there an extra one by one right here as well as an extra tile right here just to make everything a little bit more sturdy and there we go there's the new and improved corner piece already feeling a lot more solid than the old one and finally the edge pieces i saved these ones for last because they were the biggest issue on the old cube if you take a look at a real rubik's cube edge you can see we have this slightly thinner part here that sticks out a decent bit so it can really hold on underneath the center pieces whereas on this piece it sticks out maybe a millimeter and only just barely so it can basically not hold on at all now the improvement to this piece is a little bit more complicated and we're basically starting from scratch with all these pieces right here so what we're gonna do is take this weird looking piece and stick these two round pieces on either side like this then we take this round piece with a hole in it stick that on top and then we use that to attach it to one part of the edge piece then we can also stick these little triangles onto either side like this and like this you take this little bracket piece here stick it on like that take this little one by one and stick it on like this and then here's the crazy part we take this piece here stick one of these pieces onto it in the right orientation and then that goes into the bottom part of the one by one like this i didn't even know that was possible okay and then finally these two pieces go on these little studs here and there we go i don't know about you but this looks a whole lot more like a rubik's cube edge to me and it also feels a whole lot more sturdy anyway that's pretty much it for the modifications so let's go ahead and get out all the rest of the pieces the originals what we need for the corners as well as for the edges and go ahead and get started with the time lapse [Music] and here we go here are all of the new and improved lego cube pieces all fully assembled also my strategy of always buying one extra of every piece has finally paid off because i was one short of something now we've already seen what all the pieces look like but let's go ahead and see how they fit together so let's stick an edge piece into the core and it fits perfectly right between those two centers that's already way better than on the old cube and then we can grab another edge stick that right next to it and a corner and that will fit in just like that wow it's amazing how well that all holds itself together and then we can take one more edge to cap it all off and there we go there's a corner section also i just want to point out one more thing that makes this cube so much better than the old one and that is this groove right here it's super defined it's almost circular and what that means is that once you stick the next edge piece in here as you're doing a turn it can actually slide along there smoothly without just popping out because there's something to hold it in there even when the cube was turned part way which was definitely not present on the old cube okay now let's get the rest of the cube assembled [Music] and here we go wow i still can't get over how much sturdier and how much more like a rubik's cube this thing looks oh look at how easy that half turn was pose lego actually told me personally to slightly adjust the edge pieces to make the cube relatively loose and yeah it definitely is pretty loose but it also doesn't feel like it's about to fall apart let's go ahead and do a turn i think it's a lot easier when we set it on the table it's not falling apart at all at 45 degrees which is incredible way better than the old one and yeah doing a double turn isn't really that hard really the only major problem left is catching if just a single one of these two by two squares gets slightly misaligned which can happen super easily because they're only attached to the mechanism at one point then everything just starts to catch and nothing will turn it's as if this cube somehow is worse than zero corner cutting which is why everything should ideally be slightly loose you can kind of just hold it like this sort of like lift up the pieces as you're turning them the problem really isn't the smoothness of the mechanism or really the mechanism at all it's really just the fact that these pieces are legos and so they're squares and so they're catchy but hey there's our finished checkerboard pattern and it only took a couple minutes that's a huge improvement from last time and also we got no pops which if you've seen the last video you'll know that that is a miracle now if this lego cube is so good what is there to even be improved with the next version well that's what i was thinking too until i saw his second video he made this cube obsolete before i could even build it as i was just saying the last big problem left with this cube is the catching but i mean legos are squares they're pointy there's no way you could possibly ever fix that right wrong as it turns out there are actually plenty of curved lego pieces and well puzzle lego has put them to good use on his next version of this cube so here are all the pieces you need to make the final version of plus lego's lego cube well i actually ordered these before he released this tutorial so i think i'm missing a few things here or there but after spending well over 100 on legos for this video i'm just gonna make it work as you can see he's replaced the standard square 2x2 plates with these round 2x2 tiles i got this cube reassembled by the way and that'll obviously reduce a lot of catching and he's also used these rounded 1x2 plates to help produce the rest of the catching underneath the colored parts in addition to a few other rounded type pieces and just taking away anything else on the inside that could catch he's also discovered these interesting pieces for the centers which should make them a whole lot more resilient as well as a few other different pieces that he uses in the edge and corner mechanisms just to make everything a little bit more stable anyway i'm not going to walk you through exactly how you build each piece because it's pretty similar to this cube with those slight modifications but i will of course show you them once i'm done but with that let's go ahead and start the time lapse [Music] and here are all the final pieces of the final lego cube as you can see the core looks identical apart from these rounded tiles except that these are now much more difficult to accidentally break off the edges also look very similar except now that all these corners where it used to be super catchy are now rounded we're also using these slightly different vent pieces for the mechanism which have this little notch in the middle which fit on the stud there and prevent it from sliding around the corners are also now rounded off at least on one of the corners the one mistake that i made with ordering pieces is that he actually does use the same 1x2 plates that he uses on the edges on one side of the corners just to make it so that this corner mechanism will be a little bit more stable the way i have it right now it's kind of balancing on both of these one by ones and so it's a little bit wobbly but i think it'll work i think he also only had one of these big round one by one pieces on there but you know what i say if you have the one why not have the other two and of course the biggest difference you can see in the whole mechanism besides all of the rounding is actually in the corner part of the mechanism as you can see right here we've replaced the squares with triangles and i guess that'll just make things fit a little bit better yeah i guess you have a triangular slot down in there where the corner goes so why not fill it with a triangle anyway let's go ahead and get one corner section built up and then we can go ahead and finish assembling the rest of the cube [Music] so let's go ahead and get this last edge piece in and then let's go ahead and see just how good this cube turns i sure hope it turns well enough for me to solve it so let's just try and do a casual turn just like i would in any other cube yeah i don't think i've ever been able to just do turns in the cube like this without setting on the table so that's a very good sign i think it's going to be a lot more stable if we do set it on the table though so i'm just going to do it like this for the time being but yeah i think we're already about to set a record here for the fastest lego checkerboard pattern yet this is actually seriously impressive it's definitely still not perfect but the catching of the pieces has been drastically reduced which makes the turning a whole lot easier there's definitely still a little bit of internal catching going on with those triangle pieces in fact maybe even a little bit more so than with the square pieces so maybe that's something to try switching back to and the one other problem that seems to be happening is well all of the corners popping off that's already happened quite a few times in between takes here and yeah it's getting a little bit annoying that's totally my fault for ordering the wrong types of pieces by the way so i think before we go ahead and try and do a solve on this cube we better go ahead and fix that so i'll be back once the final package of legos has arrived okay so i actually managed to solve that problem in a slightly different way than puzzligo did i started out by following his solution and just replacing the problematic corner sections with these rounded 1x2s and then i figured while i was at it just replace all the corners with the rounded one by twos but as it turns out that seemed to make the cube just a little bit less stable so instead i ditched all of these pieces and came up with a slightly different solution now if you remember the problem was basically that this corner mechanism was kind of hanging on by two little round one by ones what puzzle lego did is you replace the upper black one by one with those 1x2 plates but i realized that you could also just replace the bottom one which is pretty much the exact same design as on the squared off cube except with all rounded pieces so now that it's supported by a 1 by 2 this mechanism is totally solid it's not going anywhere and best of all we actually have a consistent look on the corner pieces we don't have some of them rounded and some of them not and while we're talking about changes i also tried swapping back out to the square internals which definitely helped reduce the internal catching but it also made it so that the corners basically popped out with every turn so that wasn't gonna work but the one final change that i did make was just loosening up the core a tiny bit which i think does help reduce that catching and it makes it less likely for the internal pieces to come out of alignment which is a huge pain because then you have to take the cube apart to fix it but all of that's to say that i think i finally have this cube in a state where i'm happy to go ahead and try and solve it but first you have to scramble it up [Music] okay i think that's nice and scrambled let's go ahead and begin with our 15 seconds of inspection it looks like we can get this edge piece in as well as that one and that one pretty easily and get our across so three two one and go [Music] all right let's go ahead and get this first blue and red f2l pair in this is already going a lot smoother than i was expecting like it's just not popping wow i'm amazed [Applause] oh okay i spoke too soon i got a little internal pop right here as you can see part of the edge piece popped off that seems to be happening quite a bit but let's go ahead and fix that real quick [Music] okay we got one more little pop there but no big deal looks like we're on to our oll i think this is a possible oll i think i put all those corners in correctly [Music] all right oh well done in record time and with only a minimal number of pops let's see what our pl is hey look at j perm that's nice and easy and here we go just the last couple of moves here we just got to do a u2 and tada lego cube world record i'm calling it right there that was like just over five minutes i was honestly expecting it to take like 30. yeah it actually took plus lego 43 minutes in his video so i'm gonna say that i'm very happy with that time even if i can't design a better lego cube than puzzle go at least i have a leg up when it comes to speed cubing on his honestly i think the one thing that helped with the turning more than anything was just loosening up the core a little bit it just makes everything a little bit loose a little bit less catchy just like on the original version after doing that i think the only major problem left were those internal pops on the edge pieces they just happened super often as you can see right there it just requires a little bit of force in the wrong direction and this little vent piece will just pop right off so i think maybe a solution is actually switching back to the smooth pieces of this cube because even though it's nice that they lock into place i don't think i ever really had a problem with them sliding around on this cube and i think they hold a little bit tighter but anyway this has been a long video with a lot of legos a lot of trial and error but luckily a happy ending with a nice fast 3x3 solve in the end i hope you all have enjoyed the journey as much as i have and if you're still watching at this point and haven't already seen plus lego's original videos i'll link those in the end screen definitely go check them out anyway yeah that's pretty much it and i'll see you guys next time [Music]

Channel: Z3Cubing

Views: 470,130

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

Id: YtzJod6Jh-U

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 13 2021