Tilt Maze Puzzle

This is one of my favorite puzzles, it’s a simple ball maze, that hangs from the ceiling, and requires two or more people to attach magnetised objects to each corner of the maze in order to manipulate the ball out. The maze layout was designed at 3am on some scrap paper while watching the original…

Switchboard Puzzle

This is a rather simple, match-the-words switchboard style of puzzle. It has 6 vacuum tubes…. the old ones from the Cosmos rebuild actually… which light up every time you get a combination correct. The puzzle is made out of Batu timber, with an MDF switchboard plate and a piece of poly-carbonate in front of the…

Remote Controlled Car Bed Puzzle

One of the larger puzzles in the escape room is the bed puzzle. The premise of this puzzle is that there are two balls inside the bed, that must be nudged around an obstacle course and out of an exit hole using a remote controlled car… The catch is that the controls for the car…

Tall Shelf

This is another one of my cedar and steel creations. Like with the corner shelf, I was balancing proportions and spacings to make a piece that just feels and looks right. The constant use of a square was absolutely essential in keeping the frame true when welding. The little corner cutouts worked really nicely 🙂…

The Plinth and the Radio

The plinth forms the center of the room and the first puzzle in the escape room. The purpose of the plinth is to house the amplifier and USB sound-card for the room, but also house a concealed switch and two mysterious press buttons. I mitered the corners of the plywood, because I’m not an end…

Corner Shelf

I had wanted to build a corner shelf for a little while and nothing that I had seen had been just quite right in my eyes. For me the design is all about balancing the dimensions of the timber to the height and depth of the shelves and the thickness of the steel. I made…

A Wine Rack

It was winter and I was held up in the workshop with the pot belly stove going, a lot of steel bar and a pile of reclaimed western red cedar. So I started designing and making a very simple wine rack based on the Arthur Umanoff wine racks. However unlike the Arthur Umanoff racks I…

Fixing an Old Book

When I got this book it was in pretty bad shape. It’s actually an old photo album full of tin-type photographs. and is used as a puzzle in the escape room. Some cloth webbing, acid free glue, leather filler/dye and many many many hours later. I think it came up pretty nicely.

Burning wood with high voltages

Just a tiny post about how fun it can be burning wood with electricity!!! This is however ridiculously dangerous as the transformer outputs about 2800 VAC and is mains isolated… which means that your household safety switches will not trip if you touch the wires! Now that all of that boring safety stuff is out…