Tony Fisher
Veteran
Important facts first
It's fully functional though not correctly proportioned so I don't know if I can really claim it as a record. I made it from one of Callum's 3D printed 6mm Subatomic cubes. So I have to give most credit to him for the CAD work plus the Shapeways machine that made the original parts.
And the waffle
As most of you will know I'm obsessed with puzzle extremes and many of favourites are the highest ordered, largest, smallest etc. In the past I have persuaded Callum to print 3mm, 4mm and 5mm cube parts but none of these came out very well and it seemed clear that we are approaching the limits of current commercial 3D printing machines. So as I have found so many times the only option is to do it by hand since my limits are far greater than a piece of metal at Shapeways (head expands). My goal was simply to go smaller than Evgeny's 5.7mm cube and not destroy it. So I held the 6mm cube in pliers and carefully filed down each side. I frequently made turns to ensure it stayed even(ish). I would have settled for 5.6mm (unstickered) but ended up with 5.4mm. This scared me a bit since I must have been very close to destroying it. 5.4mm (5.6mm stickered) is a good size because there's no doubt it is the smallest. I really didn't want to get into arguments over 0.1mm and sticker thicknesses. So it's definitely the smallest but as stated earlier not definitely a Rubik's Cube in the conventional sense.
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