Wazzzzzup!
Ding Dongers!
Welcome to Ding.
The name this channel has always gone by.
It has never been called anything that might not be considered brand friendly or might
possibly lead to demonetization.
Today things are gonna get a bit rotatey.
Welcome to Michael’s Toys.
Todays toy is Topsy Turvy, a mechanism invented and designed by Lee Krasnow.
I have been following him on instagram for a long time and I love so much of what he
and Pacific Puzzleworks puts out there.
Lee is a famous puzzle maker but Topsy Turvy is not a puzzle.
No no no.
Before I say more though let’s just take a look at what it does.
Now the first thing I’m going to do is fold some of the petals on the bottom closed and
lock in a smaller top, close the rest of the puzzles, and now the big top is ready.
I’ll wrap a string around and around and around and around and around and around and
around and around until I have just enough left to wrap around my fingers so that when
I pull the top spins.
Alright now we’ve all seen tops before but what makes topsy turvy different is that it
tops and turvs.
Let’s talk about the petals.
Now the deployment mechanism looks like it might involve springs but there are no springs
powering the petals themselves.
They explode open purely under their own inertia.
This effect of inertia is often referred to as a centrifugal force but of course as we
know centrifugal forces are fictitious.
I talk about this a little bit in my video, Spinning which if you haven’t watched yet
you definitely should check out.
If you’re in a car and the car suddenly turns it can often feel as though your body
is being pushed outward radially from the center of your cars rotation.
However all that’s really happening is that the car is turning but your body is continuing
to move in a straight line.
The car blocks that path which across short time and space intervals can feel like you’re
being pushed outward but really you’re just continuing to move straight ahead.
Now the same principle is what causes the petals to open up but once they’ve opened
up, the little top they used to be holding is free and there’s nothing to slow it down.
It’s not connected to my hand or to the rest of the top that’s being braked and
so it keeps spinning and it can fall onto a little platform and continue its dance.
Let’s watch this again in slow motion.
Alright now there’s a bit of a trick to making this work.
Can I do it?
Whoa!
Hey I mean it’s still spinning and I don’t know if…oh yeah it’s in the frame.
So there’s a bit of a trick to it.
I think that sometimes it’s better to let the big top itself slow down due to friction
and air resistance a little bit before you open it because otherwise it has so much momentum
that it’ll, your hands can’t control it and the top can fly off like that.
But it’s a pretty sturdy little dude.
Let me try this one more time and I’ll let it spin on the table.
When I say it I mean the big top.
I’ll let it spin for a little longer, lose a little bit of speed and then I’ll invert
it and deploy the little top.
Okay you ready?
Here we go.
Slow motion take two.
Topsy turvy is available from Pacific Puzzleworks as a set of STL files.
If you have a 3D printer and want to make it yourself.
You can also just order the hardware needed.
You can also order just the pieces needed and build it yourself.
Or you can do what I did.
You can order it fully assembled because I am lazy and impatient.
When the package including topsy turvy arrived I also got this free other puzzle that I don’t
even know the name of.
I looked on their site and I could not find it.
It looks like the starburst puzzle that they sell.
But the pieces this breaks into are all different.
That’s right it breaks into pieces.
Right now we’ve got a very cool little stellated geometric figure but WHOA!
It is made of six identical pieces.
Kind of like little boat shapes with some notches in them.
The actual way the pieces come back together into that original shape is not very hard
to see.
So what’s funny is that the puzzle winds up being how do you fit the last piece in.
Let me show you what I’m talking about.
This is not a spoiler for the puzzle.
If I take he gold piece like this and I attach two little silver pieces on either side like
that and like that as you can see we’re building from below you can see that we’re
building up that stellated figure we had before.
And then I can take something like another gold and slip it right in there.
Perfect.
And then I can move the silvers down to make room for one of these brown pieces.
I guess it’s actually copper.
And move the silvers back up and I’m almost done.
The puzzle.
It’s a bit of dexterity puzzle too but the puzzle becomes once you’ve got the five
of the six together which is not too hard to do because you can slide pieces in and
out.
How do you get the final sixth piece in?
Obviously this piece, this gold piece goes on the other side of that gold piece over
here but how do I fit it in?
That is the true puzzle.
And I figured it out and I’m about to do it right now but there won’t be any spoilers.
Tada!
Uhhh genius alert!
Just kidding anyone can do this and everyone should try this.
Give yourself challenges and puzzles every day.
Stay curious and as always thanks for watching.