Inverted Colors Cube

Back in October, I first posted about my Inverted Color Cube.  It's basically a stickerless DaYan Guhong, which has colored plastic instead of black with colored vinyl stickers on it.  In this case, I put black stickers on it.  So rather than getting squares of color, each framed in black, you end up with squares of black, framed in a color.  I had run out of black stickers when I originally made it, and only recently placed an order with Cubesmith, including a bunch of black stickers.  I was finally able to finish this sticker-mod!

I think it looks awesome, and it's a lot of fun to play!  It's not too much of a challenge, but it's certainly a nice change!

Here are some of the sticker sets I just got from Cubesmith.  Each of the sets was only $2.50, and arrived in about two weeks.  If you plan on doing this with your cube, be sure to get the plastic scraper tool thing.  It's essentially a plastic razor blade, perfect for removing stickers.

Also in the order were a few sets of other stickers.  The top set is the vinyl "Studio" color set.  The colors don't really translate well here, but the blue is a dark blue, the green is a regular green.  Also, in person, the difference between the red and orange is a lot more obvious.

The bottom row is the vinyl "Half-Bright plus Bright Blue".  The green is more fluorescent, and the blue is noticeably brighter than the above.

Here's the vinyl mosaic set.  There's no green, but there's a pink set instead.  The red and orange are about as similar as they appear here.  Also the white/silver is prismatic, while the gold is just circular-brushed.  I'm not sure I like this set all that much.

I also got some extra white/silver prismatic vinyl stickers, the stack of black stickers, one set of which I used on the cube at the top of this post.  Then the bottom six are the vinyl "Chrome" set.  Silver, Orange, Green, Gold, Red, Blue.  They look really pretty in person, nice and metallic shiny looking.

And here is my Zhanchi restickered with those chrome stickers.  The thing is brilliant.  The funny thing is that in person the red and orange are very distinct, and the silver/gold are difficult to see... the opposite of this image.  But man...SHINY!  I'll have to be sure to always put it in a carry bag so that it doesn't get scratched to hell. hehe.

Puzzle Cube Hacks

There are a lot of hacks of Rubik's style puzzle cubes out there.  Many of them require modifications of the shapes of the pieces themselves, like Tony Fisher's "Fisher's Cube", which rotates one plane of the cube by 45 degrees.  It makes it very confusing to solve.  Similarly is the "Windmill Cube" which also rotates one plane.  Others slice away at portions of the cube to produce a dodecahedron.  (Many of these can be found on TwistyPuzzles.com).

Another modification of twisty puzzles involves restickering a puzzle cube to do things like maze puzzles, color-sudoku, and such.

I decided to do a take on this.  I had a "stickerless" DaYan 2 Guhong "speed cube" that I had bought to see what this design of cube felt like.  I'm by no means a speed cuber, but I figured I'd check it out.  I decided that this cube would be a platform for trying a few different puzzle mods.

Being "stickerless", this meant that each piece's plastic is actually the cube's color (red, orange, blue, green, yellow, white) rather than having stickers applied to a black plastic cube.  I kinda like the look of the stickerless cubes.

The first one I did was to shuffle up the cube, and put stickers (in this case, vinyl electrical tape diamonds) on it to look like pips on a die.  In its solved state, it looked like a multicolored die, 6 opposite 1, 3 opposite 4 and 5 opposite 2.  I didn't leave this cube in this state for very long, as I found that it was impossible for me to solve once it was mixed up.  I cannot find a picture of it.

Next I decided to do something with it that I'm pretty sure hasn't been done before. I made it into an "Inverted" cube.  Rather than it having colored stickers on a black cube, I have black stickers on a colored cube.  Unfortunately, I ran out of black stickers, and had to use purple for the white side, but I've got some stickers on order to replace that and "complete" this cube.

It's a nice fun challenge to only be able to partially see the colors of the sides. I really like solving this one.