Of Turkish Puzzle Rings

[lethargic_man]

As some of you will remember, I used to have a Turkish Puzzle Ring; it looked like this, but not half as nice (being made out of base metal, and with rough square edges):

(The (apocryphal) story, for those not aware, is that the Turks used to give these to their wives when they went off to fight in the Crusades, so that should their wives prove unfaithful, they'd take their wedding rings off and they'd fall apart, and they'd not be able to get them back together.)

Three and a half years years ago my old ring broke. I'm surprised it's taken me this long to think of it, but I've just got a replacement as a Chanukah present from my parents. The new one looks like this:

I thought: shall I get another four-membered ring? Nah, four-membered rings are boring, and easy. (Though it belatedly strikes me that's a possible advantage: something you can put together in ten seconds is a cool party trick; people are apt to get bored and wander off if your n-membered ring takes five minutes to solve.

On my year off I encountered someone who'd got a six-membered ring before she came to Israel. It came with instructions (which is more than I got with mine, bought from a shop in Jaffa)... but the instructions were for the wrong ring, so when she took it apart, she couldn't get it back together. She spent eight months looking for someone who could help her before she met me. It took me thirty-five minutes to crack—of which thirty minutes were spent figuring out her ring was a mirror-image of mine.

I remembered this when I wore my new ring for the first time, at an engagement party I went to yesterday. My mistake was not to also remember repeatedly spending forever trying, and not always succeeding, to put doseybat's six-membered ring back together, on several occasions.

So rather than sitting down an studying my ring systematically, I assumed I'd be able to crack it fairly quickly, and, showing it to snjstar and her boyfriend, took it off at the party and threw it in the air.

Cue two hours of on-and-off frustrated attempts to put it back together. I kept getting seven rings into place, only to find the eighth one wouldn't go in! Not only that, but at the beginning it stopped me talking to other people, and then later on, I couldn't get out and go the Chanukah party at Moishe House I'd also planned to attend, because I was surrounded by people watching me and offering useless advice, or wanting to have a go themselves, or just wanting to have a look.

Eventually, at the second party, I finally got the thing together, I have no idea how (though something Eliane R. offered as comment turned out to be the final necessary manoeuvre). During the course of this, I made the unpleasant discovery that sterling silver is really soft: twice I had to bend one of the component rings back into shape. I'm not very impressed by this. Making the ring out of sterling silver's all very well, but in this instance it would have benefitted by alloying with something to make the metal harder.

And then this evening, I gave the ring the study it should have had in the first place, and put it together twice to prove I could. The second time I timed myself, and it took four minutes.