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Hmmmm you could maybe force the baseball through a metal tube that's just barely small enough to pop out in the bottle without breaking the bottle? Otherwise yo
by 6nf 6y ago
Hmmmm you could maybe force the baseball through a metal tube that's just barely small enough to pop out in the bottle without breaking the bottle? Otherwise you'd have to do some weight reduction surgery around the equator of the baseball which gets inflated again using a one-way valve hidden between the seams?
- noman-land 6y agoOne unwritten rule with these things is that you can't "cheat". For example put an empty box of cards in the bottle and then fill it with sand. If it's a baseball, it's a baseball, not a balloon wrapped in leather.
- 2bitencryption 6y agoI'm assuming another unwritten rule is that there must be no trickery with the bottle itself? I.e. no taking a "wide mouth" bottle, filling it with some stuff, then somehow heating/narrowing the bottle? (Perhaps that isn't physically possible anyway, without leaving visible evidence)
- noman-land 6y agoYes exactly. People's first guess is often (the very boring) "did you just glue the bottom of the bottle on? What?? No! Did you blow the glass around the baseball? Um, no. "Everything goes through the neck"
- aj7 6y agoOf course that’s what they do, in most cases. The real trick is to get your mind enrolled in the intricate fiction of how.
- ganafagol 6y agoThing is: it's not fiction.
- noman-land 6y agoI've personally made some of these and I can assure you the salsa jar came from a grocery store shelf. Everything goes through the neck. Gluing the glass back together would be so incredibly boring.
- sandworm101 6y agoThere is trickery. Note the imperfections in the glass. The distortions created by the glass mask imperfections in the contents. For instance, those rubrics cubes look well bent, like they have been stretch and partially disassembled.
- risos 6y agoI don't think those bottles have been altered in anyway, a lot of standard glass bottles will have imperfections in them that look like that, amplified by the thickness of the bottle itself. You don't see this with jars because they tend to be thinner than bottles. The rubik's cube inside a bottle is a fairly easy one, if you've ever seen a disassembled rubik's cube then you will clearly see that it's possible to just feed each piece in one at a time and put it back together with some tweezers and a lot of patience.
- rutthenut 6y agoThe distortion in that photo looks like it's just a wide-angle lens, see the cork at the top.
- joe_the_user 6y agoIs having an apparently solid pieces of wood that can be disassembled like puzzle pieces cheating?
- 6nf 6y agoBut it's fair game to 'skin' the baseball, insert the baseball core into the jar, and then sew back the leather around the core again?
- noman-land 6y agoI'll answer your question with another impossible object. https://puzzleworld.org/PuzzleWorld/puz/img/arrow_through_coin_1.jpg https://puzzleworld.org/PuzzleWorld/puz/img/arrow_through_co... "Some people say the coin was placed around a tree when it was very young, and then later carved into the arrow."
- 6nf 6y agoI love it
- benlivengood 6y agoWouldn't it be easier to carve the whole thing from a single piece of wood?
- noman-land 6y agoThe coin is metal!
- bb88 6y agoBack when I was a kid there was an episode of "The Woodwright's Shop", where he talked about creating a wood box with no seams containing a coin. The trick was to drill several holes in a tree that you'll eventually cut down, and fill them with coins. Wait five or ten years for the tree to grow wood around them, then cut the tree down and carve out the boxes from the outside, leaving a hole to view the coin.
- sandworm101 6y agoNote that this is wood. If you know how to compress wood you know how to get wooden things into bottles or through holes in coins. Steam is a wonderful thing.
- aj7 6y agoYou have never held a baseball, or seen its ~30% deformation when it is hit by a bat that reverses its momentum. It is hard. One fellow just does card decks. Perhaps he has a set of special tools. But a baseball?
- mrandish 6y agoI don't actually know how it was done but based on the apparent 'ethos' of makers of impossible bottles, I would guess it's probably a legit baseball and still contains original baseball contents. It seems that these puzzle-makers are creating for the appreciation of their fellow constructors as much as they are for us newbs. I expect the 'good ones' don't rely on easy cheats as much as extreme cleverness, bespoke tools and jigs and painstaking specialized labor. My guess as to the method is the maker partially unstitched the baseball at the seam and then cut the insides into slices. Then restitched the baseball with enough pieces absent to fit through the bottle's neck and leaving a large enough opening in the seam to insert the remaining pieces once in the bottle. Insert the partially open, partially full baseball then insert the pieces, perhaps with double-sided tape pre-applied so they remain in proper position. Then stitch the open seam closed.