We are sure that you need rubber bands to assemble our polyhedral shape puzzles. The inner octahedral part of the Reza 6-8 puzzle is not self-standing. It has to be supported by the outer cube part of the puzzle to hold it together.
When you assemble the puzzle, you will probably need at least three rubber bands, maybe six or even more. Juno suggests you give an extra twist for a rubber band on each vertex of the octahedron. (Refer to the pictures)
This method makes it easier to retrieve rubber bands when you assemble the outer cube part of the puzzle.
In case you put rubber bands in an ordinary way on the puzzle, it becomes difficult to pick rubber bands once the cube part is assembled because those pieces are so cramped and there's almost no room for your fingers.
The method in the last picture is also a recommended way to put rubber bands. By twisting rubber bands several times, it gives good holding support for the pieces.
Reza 6-8 is now available on eBay, but we are also preparing to sell the puzzle on our own site. A more complex version of the polyhedral shape puzzle Reza 12-20 will also be available soon.
I am going to introduce our workplace. We have a shed where we make puzzles. Inside of the shed, there are some island workstations that are made by Juno. This time, I will show you one of the island workstations, the sanding bench. (The picture shown below)
This workstation has two disc sanders, one belt sander and one drill press. Underneath the bench, there are drawers, shelves for convenience and four small casters with a frame called a mobile base.
We make puzzles, that is, the most important point is accuracy. Juno focused on the small tables that were fixed to the disc sanders. The angle of the tables can be changed, but we normally use 90 degrees and there's no need to tilt. Therefore, Juno took the table on the right hand side away and made a table that cannot be tilted. He re-used the original table of the left hand side table and fixed it. Maybe you think that the table whose angle can be changed is more convenient. The reason that he got rid of the table is that the tables were not stable. They were a little rickety and he thought they are not stable enough for making puzzles. It's also easy to change the sanding disks on these disc sander's tables. If you have an experience using a disc sander, you may know how it is awkward to change sanding disks.
This picture below is the grit board sanding disks and belt. We sometimes forget the grit number of paper we are using. The grit number is printed on the backside of a sandpaper, so that once we attached the paper to the disc, it is not easy to make sure. That is the reason he made this board. Unless we forget to change the little dowel to the right number (This is very important), this board works well.
This is a belt sander that was customized. As we already tweeted on our twitter account on 11th October, 2016 Juno ground the base of a cheap belt sander using a Dremel (a dremel is a hand-held tool that can be used for cutting, grinding, sanding, buffing) and filed it to make it flat. We use this belt sander for sanding puzzle pieces and needed to make a flat surface, otherwise the pieces will be distorted.
Here is the last picture showing several shutters and a hose. The two levers behind the box are connected to two disc sanders. When we use the disc sander, we pull the lever and open the hole that is inside the box, then the dust from the disc sander is vacuumed to the dust collector. The upper lever of the box is connected to the belt sander. All the dust comes from disc sanders and the belt sander goes through the big hose joint on the right of this picture and goes to the dust collector. We have two dust collectors that are placed in different positions. This workstation has a mobile base with four casters and can be moved easily by one person.
I am going to introduce other shed equipments someday.
See you then.
Yukari