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A Look at Mechanical Puzzles
Mechanical or hand held puzzles have been popular for hundreds of years, and have provided many hours of puzzling fun for all types of people, both young and old. Manual puzzles can often be seen on office desks, living room coffee tables and in children’s toy boxes. Puzzles can while away a few minutes or a few hours, but the challenge of solving them grips the imagination and determination of the puzzler.
There are several kinds of mechanical puzzles, each needing a different type of thinking strategy to be applied in order to solve each type. We will look at several of the styles and the challenges they present.
The Rubik’s cube is a very popular puzzle. This puzzle requires a sequential series of steps taken in the right order to successfully solve it. The Rubik’s Cube is an example of a sequential puzzle as each step needs to be done in the right order, and finding and following the sequence is the challenge.
Chinese Puzzles are examples of puzzles which are often made of pieces of wire which have been bent into curved shapes and are linked together. The object of these puzzles is to separate the pieces by twisting and moving the pieces. When positioned in just the right way the pieces will just fall apart without any pressure or force. The ability to solve the puzzle is not a question of intelligence, it depends on your vision of space and three dimensions. These types of puzzles are known as disentanglement puzzles
Take apart puzzles are puzzles which come assembled, and you have to work out how to disassemble the object into its component parts. Often metal examples of this type are more common, involving nuts buried into wood that won’t turn, or bolts that are hooked over a key with teeth seemingly too wide to allow it to drop off.
Put together puzzles are very similar, but in this case you are provided with a set of shapes or blocks, and you have to work out how they fit together to form a shape, often a cube.
Other puzzles require good manual dexterity to solve, and usually can take hours
rather than minutes. Time and patience are needed to be successful with dexterity puzzles. One of the best-known dexterity puzzles is Pigs in Clover, in which you are to get all the “pigs” (balls) simultaneously into the “pig pen” at the center of the maze.
Pattern Puzzles require the placing or 
arrangement of separate pieces of a similar nature to complete surface patterns according to defined rules. The pattern required may be the matching of edges of squares, faces of cubes, etc. The pattern may be colour, texture, shape, etc. Where the pattern is due to differences in shape they must be sufficiently minor not to obscure the similarity of the pieces.
Seemingly impossible puzzles, are those objects constructed to look absolutely impossible, and the puzzle is to try to work out how they were created. Popular examples include things in glass bottles, such as a tennis ball, an egg or a full desk of cards.
These are a few examples of mechanical puzzles. Some people find some typesof manual puzzle easy, and others may not. Mechanical puzzles require different thinking and reasoning aptitudes depending on their type
