Kagen Sound is an artisan of remarkable skill, engineering and constructing incredibly intricate puzzle boxes made entirely of wood. WIRED brings you inside his workshop as he breaks down the design process behind his wonderful creations, and the woodworking skill he leverages to make everything snap together perfectly.
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00:00 This is a puzzle box.
00:02 How would you solve it?
00:04 Let me show you.
00:05 - Meet Kagan Sound,
00:14 a multi-award winning woodworker and artist
00:16 who has mastered the craft of designing
00:18 and fabricating intricate wooden puzzle boxes.
00:21 - There's one I made that was a 5,000 move box,
00:23 but it took so many moves it would just wear itself out
00:26 before you could really open it successfully.
00:28 You could open it a few times, but the wooden parts
00:30 would just wear out.
00:31 - With no nails, just carefully interlaced wood
00:34 and some glue, Kagan can build eye-catching riddles
00:37 that are a true challenge to solve.
00:39 - This is the hedgehog.
00:40 It is currently locked.
00:41 This is how you unlock it.
00:42 Each piece has essentially a notch and a slider underneath.
00:47 They block each other until they're moved out of the way.
00:49 So every time I move a piece,
00:51 it's unlocking the next piece to move,
00:53 which unlocks the next piece.
00:54 My favorite feature of this is actually
00:56 not all the sliding moves, but the way that the lid
00:59 comes off by twisting.
01:00 I find that really surprising and really satisfying.
01:03 It has a sort of tension to it that's really beautiful.
01:06 This box is called the Hex Flex,
01:08 and this is how you unlock it.
01:11 This is a box that I really pushed the boundaries
01:14 on the material in an absolutely insane direction.
01:17 The box was in the International Puzzle Party
01:20 design competition.
01:21 It took both top awards, therefore making it
01:24 the puzzle of the year 2023.
01:27 So not only is it an amazing puzzle, it's an amazing box.
01:30 - And each of these puzzles begins its life
01:32 in Kagan's home woodshop.
01:34 - This is my woodworking space.
01:37 I've been here for six years.
01:39 Overall, I've been a woodworker for 20 years.
01:40 I have a math degree, but as far as woodworking's concerned,
01:43 I'm entirely self-taught at that.
01:45 All the tools over in this area are for processing the wood
01:48 and breaking it down into smaller and smaller bits.
01:51 (saw whirring)
01:54 Over here, I'm usually testing out finishes.
01:56 A lot of times, if I can determine a finish
01:58 for a particular kind of wood,
02:00 it will unlock a project in itself.
02:02 Moving over here, we have one of the current projects
02:05 underway, it's called the Bookmark Box.
02:07 And in order to solve it, you actually have to find
02:10 just the right spot to push to pop out a bookmark,
02:14 and then it's used actually to unlock the box itself.
02:19 So as the work flows over in this direction here,
02:22 these are tools for cutting little miniature tracks
02:25 and miniature notches into the working parts.
02:27 As the box comes together, I start to grab more
02:31 and more hand tools to do the fine tuning of the piece.
02:34 And then the main stage where everything's taking place
02:37 in a project really is my workbench here.
02:39 As this piece comes together, it'll look something like this,
02:43 which has a final finish on it and functions as a puzzle box.
02:47 This box is called the Plus Box.
02:49 I named it after the pattern of pluses on the top
02:52 that I created out of two different colors of wood.
02:54 The clicking mechanism is created entirely by wooden parts.
02:58 It has an actual wooden spring
03:06 that clicks into little notches.
03:08 I have an example of the wooden spring
03:10 in a mechanism that rotates,
03:12 but it accomplishes the same thing.
03:14 The spring is this little chunk of wood in here
03:17 with little notches cut in it,
03:18 and it will click when it hits this notch area here.
03:21 And really all it is is just a piece of wood
03:25 with a few lines cut into it from opposing directions,
03:27 and it has a springy quality to it.
03:29 So that's the same spring that's inside of this box
03:32 in multiple places.
03:33 Kagan's newest creation, the Cafe Wall Box,
03:36 is in process in his workshop, ready to be actualized.
03:39 I have the four basic walls
03:42 of what will become my puzzle box.
03:44 I've now put in a very thick, big saw blade
03:47 that's gonna cut notches into the wood,
03:49 and the notches are gonna create the joinery
03:51 that holds together those two rectangles
03:54 and creates the corner edge of these boxes.
03:56 This cut will need to be at an angle
03:58 so that I can make what's called a dovetail track.
04:01 It's a shape of a trapezoid,
04:03 and that has the function of housing a slider
04:06 that's also a trapezoid.
04:08 It won't be able to pop out.
04:09 It's a sliding part, and it will stay attached to the box,
04:12 but have the ability to go back and forth.
04:14 So that was just one side of each of the trapezoid notches.
04:18 I'm gonna cut the other side of that same notch now.
04:21 Now what I'm gonna do is take these little pieces of wood
04:24 with my notches and use this tool called the router
04:26 to remove all the material
04:28 in between these two little notches I made.
04:31 (saw whirring)
04:33 After machining notches into these pieces of wood,
04:37 I now have a dovetail track.
04:39 After machining, I'll have to come around with a chisel
04:41 to trim leftover fuzzy material
04:44 or parts that the machine couldn't get to
04:46 and make it a clean, precise dovetail track.
04:48 - This kind of detailed woodworking
04:51 is a true passion for Kagan,
04:53 but his love of puzzles began long before
04:56 he was building with wood.
04:57 - I'd always loved puzzles,
04:58 but when I first saw a puzzle box,
05:00 it was a whole 'nother level of interest.
05:03 The first ones I ever made, I was in middle school,
05:06 and I didn't even have wood.
05:07 I had cardboard.
05:08 So it's just a box that had a move to open,
05:10 but you couldn't see it.
05:11 It was a very secretive sliding lid box.
05:14 So I carried that thought with me
05:15 all the way to college,
05:16 and then I just was dying to create this out of wood.
05:19 I'm almost more proud of myself
05:20 for just getting myself into a place to build that box.
05:23 It represents a lot to me,
05:24 a lot more than just building it.
05:26 It was the path of finding the tools
05:28 and the passion of wanting that design to be a real thing.
05:31 To solve the pinwheel box,
05:33 this is working entirely on a principle in puzzles
05:36 called coordinate motion.
05:37 You have more than one moving part,
05:39 and they all move into each other in such a way
05:42 that they also move out of the way of each other.
05:45 So each of these panels that's rectangular
05:47 has a diagonal movement that goes towards the other.
05:50 So this panel right here
05:52 wants to move diagonally towards this,
05:54 and then this one moves diagonally towards that.
05:56 And when they all move diagonally at the same time,
05:58 it allows them to shift in a simultaneous dance together.
06:02 This is the Rune Cube.
06:04 It's locked, and this is how you solve it.
06:07 Already going, getting stuck.
06:15 There we go.
06:16 That's what I missed.
06:17 I am getting stumped.
06:21 See if I have that correct.
06:23 There are some puzzles I have
06:29 that would take me a while to unlock,
06:32 and this would qualify as one of those.
06:33 There we go.
06:37 So as I'm designing these puzzle boxes,
06:39 a lot of it is just contemplative.
06:42 I'm just sitting, thinking about
06:43 how these things move in my head.
06:45 I really don't get too carried away drawing it in detail.
06:48 I'll mostly just do very rough sketches,
06:50 sometimes a sequence of moves.
06:52 But I keep it very loose
06:54 in order to give myself flexibility
06:56 because the designs really change a lot.
06:58 Something like the cafe wall pattern shifting illusion
07:02 actually came out of woodworking
07:04 where I was creating a piece of inlay,
07:05 and I was moving the little parts around
07:07 to make this inlay block,
07:08 and then I noticed, oh, they can turn into other patterns.
07:11 But what's amazing is it's made up of five strips of wood,
07:14 and the strips are really actually quite simple
07:16 in comparison to what the pattern is.
07:18 So with the box lid,
07:20 there's two of these sliders that change patterns.
07:22 And what I like to do with a lot of my puzzles
07:24 is to have someone who's opening the box
07:27 be required to actually creating different patterns
07:30 along the way of solving it.
07:32 Making patterns starts from two different colors of wood,
07:36 and these woods, I take and I glue them
07:38 and I stack them all together.
07:40 And after they're glued up,
07:42 I take this block and I then machine out
07:46 angled rectangular blocks.
07:47 These blocks are then arranged into striped pattern,
07:52 and these will then get glued together.
07:53 After the pattern's created, I take a wet sponge.
07:56 I can wet the top of that wood a little bit.
07:58 Just has it effective making the wood more pliable
08:01 for a plane.
08:02 And then iron it to flatten it out.
08:05 I now have a veneer, and I'll just glue this down
08:08 onto a strip of cherry.
08:10 So this turns from here into here.
08:13 This side has the top,
08:15 and there's two notches cut on each side here,
08:17 and the top will then slide in just like this.
08:20 In order to force someone to actually solve
08:22 these different patterns,
08:24 it requires that each of these sliders
08:25 is attached to a little peg,
08:27 and that the peg then has to go
08:29 and navigate through a maze.
08:31 So I've made this lid that goes underneath it,
08:34 and it will register each of the sliders
08:37 and make it so you have to progress
08:39 through the patterns to unlock it.
08:41 So that sits in here.
08:43 I've prepared a box and finished it.
08:45 For this particular box,
08:46 I opted to start with a different pattern
08:48 and have it transform into the pattern you saw before.
08:51 As like the other one, the side slides down,
08:54 you would then slide the pattern,
08:56 and that would be the opening of that box.
08:58 The maze plate itself, just push on it to pop it up,
09:01 and you can see the inside of the box.
09:04 - As hard to solve as some of Kagan's puzzles are,
09:06 he encouraged me to try and figure out one for myself.
09:10 Okay, this moves.
09:11 - You're doing the right thing
09:12 by looking for what needs to move.
09:14 That's what it's all about.
09:16 - Oh no, I'm stuck.
09:17 Backwards.
09:18 Oh, this is so fun.
09:19 - Yeah, this is essentially a maze,
09:21 but made out of rectangles.
09:22 So you are currently in the maze.
09:25 - Oh, I just went backwards.
09:26 I think I did that one already.
09:29 - Getting lost in a maze is a big part
09:31 of solving Puzzle Box,
09:32 and remembering where you were,
09:34 recognizing new passages.
09:36 - Yeah. - Big part of the fun.
09:37 - Uh-oh, I got stuck again.
09:39 - So this is a little psychological.
09:40 It might have tricked you into thinking
09:42 you didn't make any progress,
09:43 but I would encourage you to keep going forward
09:46 on those tiles.
09:47 You've actually accomplished a lot.
09:49 You've changed the state of those tiles.
09:51 They're now rearranged.
09:53 So if things are rearranged,
09:54 that could mean something different can happen.
09:56 - Oh, so maybe I can like push it?
09:59 - So that wasn't allowed to happen before.
10:03 That's a new thing.
10:05 - Oh, that's so cool.
10:07 - Yeah, when you're playing with a Puzzle Box,
10:09 you just always are paying attention
10:10 to how things change.
10:12 And it might be very subtle,
10:13 and it might make you think
10:14 you aren't making any progress,
10:15 but you really are.
10:16 As long as you keep exploring,
10:17 you'll eventually get it open.
10:19 - That's really cool.
10:20 I'm hooked, and I wanna do like six more.
10:22 (both laughing)
10:23 It's really fun.
10:25 - So this box is called the Snake Box.
10:28 I took the block box concept a little bit further
10:30 and used rectangles that I made out
10:32 of two different colors of wood.
10:34 Right now, it's tessellation that I really like
10:36 that I refer to as snakes.
10:38 And what it does is by shifting the blocks around on it,
10:42 it transforms into an entirely new pattern
10:46 that's very identifiable.
10:47 If this pattern is created,
10:48 then you've solved the box and you can open it up.
10:51 - No matter how many boxes Kagan builds or attempts,
10:54 his love for puzzles only continues to grow.
10:56 - I think people love mechanical puzzles
10:58 because there's a playfulness to it.
11:01 It's reminding us to be a child
11:02 and to interact with something in a tactile way,
11:05 but also be thoughtful and curious about the object.
11:08 To me, the best puzzles are the ones
11:11 that you can play with for an hour,
11:14 and then you can hand it over to your five-year-old
11:16 and they can look at it and solve it in five minutes.
11:19 I think children are just inherently good puzzle solvers,
11:22 and they're also inherently good at creative projects.
11:25 They're inherently good at just anything
11:26 that everyone wants to be.
11:28 And I think that's really what gets in people's way
11:29 when they're trying to solve a puzzle.
11:31 They almost are forgetting that there's still a child.
11:34 There's a child inside of them that's still there.
11:36 (upbeat music)