Many years ago, our friend Ed Pegg Jr. had some octiamond sets made, packaged as 6 triangles from a gorgeous solution by David Bird. Not being seriously in the puzzle-selling business, Ed offered us the left-over parts. Now we were already making our own glorious big Octiamond Ring, and being good fools, we bought out Ed's orphaned sets.

When we finally got to looking through the inventory, we realized that a whole lot of additional parts and labor would be needed before any complete sets could be offered for sale. In fact, it took us several years of procrastination to sort out everything and decide on its final form. The unprocessed box glared at us accusingly in the workroom every day until we finally tackled it and wrestled order from the chaos.

Ed had simply placed the six triangles in layers, with no dividers, only frames, just one solid bottom piece and a lid, with the whole Dagwood sandwich bolted together through the 3 corners. While that held all the pieces snug for storage or shipping, it was unwieldy for actually playing with it and then rebuilding it. Without a floor for each layer, there would be no way to pick up all those pieces and stack them again.

We decided to give each layer its own floor, gluing the little borders on them to make individual holding trays. Worked like a charm, even though we had to cut hundreds of floors and spent many days gluing. The next step was peeling the protective paper off each piece, sometimes on both sides. Because of the years in storage, the paper was not always willing to come off. Heating it with a heat gun helped a little, though it was still a struggle. Oh, but what pretty colors showed up—transparent and translucent shimmers in 6 colors per set. Having each "petal" with its own color would surely be helpful in sorting and solving the set back to its original configuration.

We happily offered the OCTIAMOND STACK in its limited edition, while they lasted, for avid solvers and collectors, at a ridiculously low price. We didn't supply an instruction book, only a solution sheet. You can find more than you can handle at Ed's website, MathPuzzle.com, and on the Poly Pages of Andrew Clarke.