My 9x9x9 Rubik's Cube Hoax
In 2007 I am pretty sure that no 9x9x9 Rubik's existed in the world. Certainly not a properly proportioned one. On 23rd February I made a new post on the twistypuzzles forum. The post was a hoax and contained the pictures you see below as well as the link to a carefully edited video.
All pictures plus the video here are part of the hoax and DO NOT show a fully functional cube.
After 26 years of serious puzzle making I figured it would be fun and a change to instigate this hoax. I never expected anyone to believe it and I was always going to own up pretty quickly afterwards. Some people got the joke but many didn't and once again I apologise to those who believed I had really created this puzzle. ALL my other puzzles are genuine and I will NEVER repeat this. After I owned up I forgot all about the You Tube video and it was sometime later that I changed the description. It was certainly not my intention to leave it so long.
The 'puzzle' itself was created partly for the hoax but also because I wanted to own a 9x9x9 mock-up until I could get my hands on the real thing. It was necessary to make three for my hoax.
Sometime ago I picked up 200 poor quality Mini (keychain) Rubik's Cubes on ebay. These were a perfect size for my fake 9x9x9. The first step was to fix three of these cubes together in a stack forming a 3x3x9 block. I did this in such a way that it was possible to rotate all nine horizontal rows though nothing else. I then disassembled several more of the Mini Cubes and glued them into solid 1x3x3 blocks. I then glued eight of these together in a square around each one of the 3x3x9's rows to make each of the nine 1x9x9 layers required. This makes a 9x9x9 looking puzzle which has nine layers of rotation in one dimension but none in the others.  This could be viewed as a 1x1x9 puzzle with 65,536 combinations though extremely easy to solve. As stated the photos to the left and above were used in the forum post. I knew some people would zoom into the black areas to see the mechanism so I retouched the pictures to obscure these areas. The picture below shows a whole one plus one disassembled.


The way I put stickers on the cubes was extremely important to carry off the hoax. The aim was to use the three cubes to give the impression in the video that just one had gone from totally solved to a six sided chequered pattern. To achieve this each was stickered differently and by swapping the puzzles during the video I could give the impression that there was just one fully functional puzzle. I have a section of unedited video here. In this video you can see how I carefully swapped puzzles. When this swap was edited out and camera angles changed it looks like only one puzzle was used. If you view the original video again here you will see what I mean. I will repeat that ALL of my other puzzles are real and fully functional.
In December 2009 myself and some friends finished a genuine fully functional 11x11x11. I have heard talk of 13x13x13s and (2011 update) there has now been a fully functional 17x17x17 made. It now seems strange looking back at my 9x9x9 hoax.

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