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Very cool! Follow up idea, which I'm sure adds tons more complexity: have each face be a different material or finish. E.g. one face is stainless, another anod

Very cool! Follow up idea, which I'm sure adds tons more complexity: have each face be a different material or finish. E.g. one face is stainless, another anodized aluminum, zinc plated for a third, brass on another. Each of the edge pieces would have to be a two-part assembly, and the corners composed of the three materials joined together (joinery, screws, brazing). That surely would feel strange with the varying densities and thermal masses while solving, but would look very cool. To be fair, it appears from the pictures that each center piece's pattern is symmetric, which avoids the difficult part of aligning those when solving (center often doesn't line up when solving a cube with pictures on the faces in place of a solid color). Probably far too niche for selling these to be profitable, but I'd love to have one.

jstanley 5y ago
> center often doesn't line up when solving a cube with pictures on the faces in place of a solid color I don't understand this. If you have a corner piece in the wrong corner then won't the colours on the adjacent faces be wrong?
- BoppreH 5y ago
  The corner and edge pieces are guaranteed to have the right orientation, but the center pieces can be in any 90° orientation. Imagine an arrow printed on a center piece; a cube can be solved and still have that arrow pointing to any of the 4 neighboring sides. Here's a video explaining special algorithms to rotate only the center piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk1eCZNCTB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk1eCZNCTB4
  - jstanley 5y ago
    Ah, interesting, thanks! So it's possible to reach a configuration where every side has the centre rotated but all the colours match up. I would not have believed that without seeing it.
somebodynew 5y ago
I think that it would be difficult to keep everything clean enough to avoid galvanic corrosion at the metal interfaces once someone has touched it. I experienced surprisingly rapid corrosion when securing copper lugs using zinc-plated steel nuts and bolts until I started handling them exclusively with gloves.

jstanley 5y ago

> center often doesn't line up when solving a cube with pictures on the faces in place of a solid color I don't understand this. If you have a corner piece in the wrong corner then won't the colours on the adjacent faces be wrong?

BoppreH 5y ago
The corner and edge pieces are guaranteed to have the right orientation, but the center pieces can be in any 90° orientation. Imagine an arrow printed on a center piece; a cube can be solved and still have that arrow pointing to any of the 4 neighboring sides. Here's a video explaining special algorithms to rotate only the center piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk1eCZNCTB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk1eCZNCTB4
- jstanley 5y ago
  Ah, interesting, thanks! So it's possible to reach a configuration where every side has the centre rotated but all the colours match up. I would not have believed that without seeing it.

somebodynew 5y ago

I think that it would be difficult to keep everything clean enough to avoid galvanic corrosion at the metal interfaces once someone has touched it. I experienced surprisingly rapid corrosion when securing copper lugs using zinc-plated steel nuts and bolts until I started handling them exclusively with gloves.