I disassemble things so you don't have to.

At a recent gig, I was solving my big 12cm Paladone cube. It's fun at night because it lights up, and it's less obvious on stage than leaving a flashlight up there. But, the cube is made mostly of acrylic, so perhaps I should have been more gentle trying to get through solves. Thankfully it was after the musical portion of the evening and while my drummer was packing up, because that meant only a couple of people saw the giant cube self-destruct. One of the spindle posts sheared off, and the entire layer of the cube that was being held in by that center piece tumbled to the cobblestone. Thankfully no small internal pieces went missing (except perhaps a nylon washer).

Today, I'm working on reassembly, so I thought it might be fun to show off the inside because I don't plan to have it apart often.

Here's the post that I had to cement back on. You can see a little of the the circuit board inside where the LED's that light up the interior of the cube are.

Here's the non-WCA compliant logo on one of the corners.

And here are the sub-parts of the center piece.

When the post finishes drying in a couple of hours, I can slide the lower part of the center on, re-seat the spring, lube and install the swivel ring, screw the retaining screw back in, and snap the center cap back on. There's a chance it's going to shear apart again, but I may also have a different glue formulation available if for some reason this one doesn't work out. I may also have to add a plastic washer

On another personal cubing note, I improved my best time on 6x6x6 by an entire minute, but going from 11:36.24 to 10:33.54 doesn't seem like much when the record time for a 6x6x6 is 1:20.03 (Feliks Zemdegs, AUS) and USA's own Max Park is closing in on him, having beaten Kevin Hays' best single by almost 5 seconds to take the #2 spot.

Here's Max's recent WR average that includes a 1:21.31 single.



POSTSCRIPT: Sometime while this was going up, Max Park broke the 6x6x6 single record.