I Made A Magnetic Kilominx. Sort Of.

[VIBE_ZT]

So, I put magnets my ShengShou Kilominx.

This is MK. 1 of this experiment. And I consider it a success in some ways, and a failure in others.


It was a success because it is almost fully magnetized. The pieces do attract correctly.

I used 90 3x1mm N35 magnets.
Which, spoiler alert, is the reason that I consider this experiment to be a failure.

Failure isn't bad though, because it shows you what went wrong, and gives you a chance to fix it the next time

It was a success because nothing major went wrong, and it was a pretty smooth process to magnetize everything.


It was a "failure" because the magnets are too weak to be felt, and I'm not even sure if they help keep the puzzle together in any way.

I also ran out of magnets, so I couldn't put two magnets in each edge like I planned. So there is only one in each edge.

So yes, I magnetized this using an edge-corner scheme. I utilized the holes in the edges by putting the magnets in there.

...

So, I put three magnets in each corner.

.

....and one in each edge. That's all I had enough for.
.

And they attract. And work.

So I would consider this experiment successful, I guess.


To my knowledge, I am the first person to try to magnetize a Kilominx.
That is probably not true, but I can dream

What I would do differently next time:

• USE STRONGER MAGNETS
• Find a way to use less glue.
• Figure out how to better center the magnets.

This was only my second time magnetizing a puzzle, so I realize that it is no Cubicle Labs quality job. But I tried

 

[Filipe Teixeira]

oh wow

 

[SM cubing]

oh wow

The art of poetry

 

[teh yoshi]

Hey, this is actually pretty amazing! It's a real shame we don't have much choice in the way of kibiminx hardware. In fact, we only have TWO choices between the ShengShou black and the FanXin (CubeStyle) stickerless. The internals are nearly identical, the only difference I could spot between the two is that ShengShou has super weird non-symmetric caps, whereas the stickerless has symmetrical and easy to remove caps.

Judging by the space given in the internal design, there's practically no room for... well, anything. The corner pieces are squashed and is just a mess inside with pillars everywhere. I wish the internal "edge" pieces were also symmetrical so that we could fit two magnets equally on each side. My only hope is to somehow have some sort of neutral magnetic metal press-fitted into the internal edges, but that seems like way too much work.

The only issue I could see with your method is that some faces may have more attraction than others, depending on the orientation of the hidden internal pieces (with only having one magnet in it). There may even be a chance that an entire face will have no magnetic attraction at all if all internal edges happen to be facing away from it! But as it is, there doesn't seem to be much of a choice at the moment, so I'm really glad you experimented with this. Great job!

 

[VIBE_ZT]

Hey, this is actually pretty amazing! It's a real shame we don't have much choice in the way of kibiminx hardware. In fact, we only have TWO choices between the ShengShou black and the FanXin (CubeStyle) stickerless. The internals are nearly identical, the only difference I could spot between the two is that ShengShou has super weird non-symmetric caps, whereas the stickerless has symmetrical and easy to remove caps.

Judging by the space given in the internal design, there's practically no room for... well, anything. The corner pieces are squashed and is just a mess inside with pillars everywhere. I wish the internal "edge" pieces were also symmetrical so that we could fit two magnets equally on each side. My only hope is to somehow have some sort of neutral magnetic metal press-fitted into the internal edges, but that seems like way too much work.

The only issue I could see with your method is that some faces may have more attraction than others, depending on the orientation of the hidden internal pieces (with only having one magnet in it). There may even be a chance that an entire face will have no magnetic attraction at all if all internal edges happen to be facing away from it! But as it is, there doesn't seem to be much of a choice at the moment, so I'm really glad you experimented with this. Great job!

Thank you!

Yeah... the puzzle simply wasn't designed to house magnets, so I had to improvise.

This first experiment was more trying to see if it was possible, rather than functional.

And with the edges, I believe that if you filled in the space with an epoxy or filler and left a small indent in the filling for the magnets, then you could have a place to put them and the puzzle would be fully magnetic.


When / if the QiYi Kilominx comes out, I plan to see if the mechanism will be more accepting of magnets, unlike the ShengShou is.