My Christmas Project

It's Christmas time and I'm having a great time at home. I've played hours of Geometry Wars Galaxies (which is an AMAZING game and totally worth the $40 price tag) and even more hours of Guitar Hero III (I'm getting better! I've almost beat it on Hard, by myself!). Other than just playing video games I've also taken the opportunity to get back to what I really enjoy: building stuff.

A little over a month ago I saw this Instructable and instantly bookmarked it for future reference. For Christmas I asked for the dice and the magnets necessary to build it and on Christmas morning I opened up a small box full of blue dice and little neodymium magnets! The day after Christmas, after an hour or two of Guitar Hero III, I set to work making my Dice Rubik's Cube.

The first step was to lay out all of the dice in the right orientation and mark the sides that needed to be drilled for magnets.



After marking the polarities of each magnet and marking the sides to be drilled on the die I set to setting up the jig on my drill press.



It's so nice being back home where I have access to a workshop and decent powertools that I don't have to share with people! I can take as much time as I want and do everything right.

The next step was to start gluing in the magnets. I put a little krazy glue gel in the hole, put in the magnet, and then attached an orange hand clamp.



I'd do as many dice at a time as my clamps would allow, which turned out to be nine.



Wash, rinse, repeat, and after 27 die and 97 magnets I was left with a Rubik's Cube made of dice! Here are some pictures of it with the centers removed:





And here's a picture of the finished cube:



My favorite part? You can see the magnets through the cube, which you would think may look bad, but it actually has a really neat effect.



So that's my Christmas project. I urge anybody considering making this to do it, it was really fun and only took a day. Good luck, I hope you enjoyed.