Coke bottle in a row

You know the guy and his famous metal puzzles? You may also know his bottle puzzles I am sure.
But did you see so many bottles???

7 coke bottles linked with a long rod and locked on each side and inside!!

A lot of care is needed to handle that. First because it's fragile. Then because if you hold the puzzle on each side you apply pressure in the middle of the rod. It would be a pitty to destroy such a beauty:)

You can unlocked the 2 locks on each side, but how to unlock the inside locks?...

You don't have acces to them with your fingers....probably no tools are allowed....

Seriously I am (b)locked... :-(

Any idea?

Coke bottle #5

In the series of the coke bottle puzzles, I will review #5.

As usual, the goal is to free the marble that is trapped and you should not need to use external tools.

So here you see a red rod with screw in 2 places and an hexagonal screw that may be useful at some point.

You definitely need a bit of dexterity (especially when you reassemble the puzzle) but you also need to use the tools in the appropriate way.

I liked a lot the steps and I did not find this puzzle fetched contrary to a previous puzzle bottle with a black top. I feel that the tools are used in a clever way.

About the difficulty, I would say it's moderate: not overly difficult, but not that easy. So a nice challenge. I am sure you would like it.

I am sure you have seen that it should not come out that way :-)

To conclude: one of my favourite Strijbos' coke bottle puzzles!

Exchange bottle

Exchanged by Wil Strijbos, this puzzle have some uncommon features.

First, it differs from Wil's usual bottle that are in glass. Secondly this one has 2 goals. And finally, guess what? The bottle is normally used for pee tests....!!

OK so one goal is to free the ball. The second goal is to put the metal ring that is inside same as in the right picture. Indeed at the beginning does not "cover" the shackle of the lock but only goes through.
The bottom of the bottle has a hole and maybe this can be useful. Ah...and I forgot to mention, don't even try to open the bottle: this has been glued!! What did you expect??
Like another of Wil's bottles, the keys are outside. Surely they will be useful in some ways.

So despite its original look and its "must-have" value for a collector, what about the solving process?
Tying to not spoil, I would say that this is a dificult puzzle. Of course, you have to get clever ideas in the right moments, but even if you have these ideas, the puzzles requires dexterity, I would even say a pretty hard dexterity, especially for one goal.
And you have also to pay attention to not use brute force and be careful to avoid damaging the plexi. This is not a strong plexi, so be careful. Not to put in every hands...

What do I think about this puzzle? I like it a lot...but I would have liked even more with less dexterity (and why not more steps) and in a thicker bottle.
In Wil's flickr you can see some other bottles. A strange one has even a lot of things inside...would be worth the case to make some more! :-)

Gary's escape

Yes this is a pretty old (from 1997) puzzle (which makes it highly collectible!!) designed by Gary Foshee and composed of a bottle, a metal rod and a marble to be freed.
 

Everything what you need is provided with the puzzle. You just have to take care because, being made with glass, it's fragile.

It's by no mean a difficult puzzle, pretty straight forward, but the ideas are clever. Even if you're not a seasoned puzzler, you immediately know what you have to do, how you will do it and what you expect the result to be. But still you will have pleasure to solve it.

In the solution booklet Gary says to unscrew the bottle to reassemble all the things inside. But if you want a pretty difficult challenge you can try to reassemble it without unscrewing the bottle.

What is your favourite bottle puzzle?

To conclude: this is a nice puzzle and perfect for an exchanged puzzle

Bottle coke #9

This bottle is quite unusual because it is in aluminium and not in glass, and thus you cannot see what you're doing, which makes things even more difficult!

By the way, if it were transparent, it would have been too easy :-)

There is a marble inside the bottle, and again the goal is to free it. This time, you don't have to worry about the rigidity of the bottle because this one cannot break, at least from my experience.

As if the fact of not having a glass bottle was not enough, there is a washer that provides you from seeing what the mecanism is, this makes the puzzle more difficult to solve.

You can notice that a hole is pierced in the place of the bear's nose, so maybe this can be useful...
But anyway the hole is pierced in a "designed way". I mean if it were just in the red it would not have looked really nice, whereas here it's almost normal to have a hole for the nose of the bear.

Wil Strijbos adds 2 glowing sticks along with the puzzle. They can be used to see what is inside of the bottle. Try to make good use of them because they don't last forever. But, keep them even after they don't produce light any longer. Usually you should not throw away anything with Strijbos' puzzles.

The fashioned way to find treasures inside your nose :-)

The bottle is very very tricky. The mechanism is simple but cool. Only Strijbos can design such a devilish mechanism. And when you've solved it, you will see how simple things can be so difficult sometimes. But don't think, however, that it's too simple; the mechanism is very well thought.

No shaking, banging is allowed (nor useful) and use of external tool is not useful. Remember that external tools are everyting that do not come along with the puzzle...

I advise you to buy it if Wil make it again, I am sure that it will fit well in your bottle puzzles collection or/and un your Strijbos' puzzle collection.

Bottle coke #4

This bottle puzzle is another puzzle from the Dutch designer Wil Strijbos. This one is composed of a lock attached to a metal chain. Keys are provided but it's difficult to use them as you can see from the pictures below. The funny thing is that this puzzle looks like an impossible bottle, but I assure you that it is solvable..with tears, blood and sweat of course...

You need to find out how to take the lock out of the bottle and the small metal piece above the lock.

Again, it's hard...

Even if external tool are officialy not useful, they are more than welcome because the official solution is very very fetched and you will likely not use it (I did not) either because you did "wrong" things or because it would have never happened in your mind to use it.

But you and me don't know what's happening in the mind of puzzle designers when they're designing their puzzles :-)

So I used an external tool to open it, it is much easier. But it seems that you can open it just using all what is provided to you. So keep everything that comes with the bottle when it arrives if you want to use the official solution...

For this puzzle you will need quite an amount of dexterity and even more when you will reassemble the puzzle (for this, don't be a fool, come on, use external tools^^!!).

Finally solved!!!

An unusual bottle puzzle that will fit well in your collection I think.

But this is not my favourite bottle puzzle and I was a bit disappointed by the "official" solution that I don't really like!

And you, what do you think about it? Leave your comments :-)

Bottle coke #1

Here we are with another Strijbos' puzzle. It is composed of a red stick (the first bottle coke#1 has not a red stick but a white one), a marble (that you have to get out of the bottle) and of course an empty bottle of coke. At the bottom of the red stick there is a screw maintained to the red stick by a nut.

The goal is obvious and what you have to do is obvious too. You have to unscrew the screw so that the red stick can be taken completely out of the bottle, which would free the marble. Easier said than done...!

This puzzle does not require a lot of steps to be solved but it's tricky, and you know that before you try this puzzle, just because it's a Strijbos' :-)
The first step is clever. The next step you will be tempted to act like as you did with the 1st step and you will notice that it does not work. It's normal, you just don't do the correct thing. Have a careful look at the red stick, perhaps that may help you. Anyway, you don't need any external tools.

Be gentle with the bottle, it's in glass and glass can break...

Solved finally!! With a lot of perseverance

Once you've solved the bottle and understood it, then you need to reassemble the bottle. It may require a bit of dexterity, but I managed to use a good method and thus it did not take me long time.


If you like bottle puzzles or if you intend to complete your collection of bottle puzzles, I advise you to buy it when Wil Strijbos has some to sell (they are pretty scarce because it seems that Wil does not make a lot of them). I keep hoping that Wil will make again some of the other bottle puzzles, my collection of them is not completed yet :-(

Prepare for war: BQTTLE is coming soon !!

War for your nerves because this puzzle will challenge a lot your dexterity !!

This puzzle called BQTTLE was made by Sandor Bozoki (he also makes some impossible bottles with matches inside) and presented during last IPP in London (2014). It is composed of a metal chain, a rubber O-ring and a small glass bottle. 

The good thing with this puzzle is that you cannot damage the bottle with what is inside!

The goal is to free the O-ring. It is not difficult to understand how to do that but really much more difficult to do it. Indeed, it requires a lot of dexterity to solve it, and even using dexterity, this is not an easy task...Reassembling the puzzle is more difficult than solving it. So if you have some difficulties to solve it, good luck then :-)

The puzzle comes with the solution and a tool to take the O-ring out of the bottle in case the chain is too much knoted (you can unscrew the cap of the bottle), which is a good idea.

I was wondering why putting a metal chain that may create knots, but I think it's because it's better than rope for the gravity.

To conclude: a cheap puzzle that you should buy if you like bottle puzzles, but much more important if you like dexterity puzzles! Otherwise, perhaps not the puzzle you should have...

Perrier bottle puzzle

I bought some bottle puzzles from Wil Strijbos which I will review in other posts.

Wil Strijbos makes a good job when he protects puzzles: they are wrapped in a certain way that the pieces that may shake during the delivery are maintained in place, so that nothing can move and break the puzzle. Indeed, the things inside the tricky bottles (here a plug) can rattle during the shipment and break the bottle...

This a classic Perrier bottle (so in glass, of course) with a metal tube inside. You need to take the plug out of the bottle without any force or shaking. The metal tube is the real obstacle, without it the solution is simple. With it, the solution requires thinking...

It seems impossible, well...it is possible! You just don't know how to solve it ;-)

Unsolved

Be careful: too much shaking can break the bottle...(it did not happen to me because I knew that...). The bottle is provided with a cap, keep it !! By the way, you should always keep everything that goes with Wil's puzzles.

The solution is very "elegant", and to solve the puzzle you need to try things, you need to use what you have...no external tools are required to solve the bottle.

You may manage to solve this puzzle with dexterity, but first this is not the intended solution, and then you may need to shake to bottle...and may break it...

Solved!! What?! Nothing has moved unless the plug?...So strange :-)

Just to avoid any bad ideas you may have:

-> don't put water in the bottle! Of course with water the plug can move to the top, but then because of the tube some water will stay in the bottle...!!

-> don't put anything inside the bottle

I think that if you like bottle puzzles, that is a "must-have" in your collection not only for the design but also for the solving process.