LEGO Rubik's Cube
The idea of building a working Rubik Cube has always appealed. Here the challenge is to create a mechanical device that has a number of degrees of freedom about a central point. It's not easy! The cube consists of 12 edge pieces, 8 corner pieces and one central piece. All of these have to be interlocking, yet still be able to rotate about any axis at any time in any direction! And all this with a basic square block! Thankfully LEGO has been kind and the ratio of 5 bricks to 6 studs allows us to create a genuine cube structure.
I must point out that quite independently a fellow LEGO enthusiast has also contructed a working Rubiks cube. Maarten Steurbaut's cube is quite a bit different from mine. His original design is based around 8x8x8 cubes and so it's slightly larger than my cube. After seeing my version Maarten went on to create a Rubik's cube that's smaller than my one based on 4x4x4 cubes. The challenge now is to get proper corner pieces into the 4x4x4 version.
Rather than boring you with endless detail of how a Rubik Cube works it's probably better just to scoll down or use the links to jump to a specified sections and see how it was constructed. There's even a *.wmf movie of the Rubik's cube in action - yes its operation was a bit sticky due to there being slightly different levels between pieces (a result of not having enough tile plates), and self-destruction was always a possibility!
Use the following links to view the details of the Rubik's Cube.
- Views of the Rubik cube: Photographs
- The corners: Corner pieces
- The edge pieces: Edge pieces
- The inside: Internal workings
- Construction: Putting it together
- A movie of the cube: The Rubiks cube in action (~1 MB).
Views of the Rubiks cube
There are four photographs of the whole Rubik cube. Three are the basic LEGO model and the fourth has the stickers attached. Thw whole cube was pretty big, which meant trying to do it very difficult. In fact the whole model was prone to self-destucting, something that could only really be solved by using glue. I also didn't have enough tile pieces. The consequence of this can be seen in the movie of the cube in action. Bascially, it meant that some of the centre and edge pieces had at fractionally different heights than their neighbours, resulting pieces catching when rotating.