I was obsessed with Rubik in my youth, and I had a few of those solution tutorial books that told you all the patterns to take to solve the cube from any possible scramble.
My personal best time was 63 seconds.
I owned both official and knock-off cubes, and I found the official cube far superior, merely for reasons of coloring, and also solid construction; it was smoother and it was much less likely to explode in my hands as I cubed at top speed.
I spent inordinate amounts of time in the upstairs bathroom lubricating my cubes with a big tub of Vaseline. My parents never confronted me or even seemed to wonder what I was doing in there; I suppose it was still a bit too early for us to worry about anything morally questionable. But I did go through a lot of Vaseline.
Interestingly enough for a while the knock-off cubes were markedly better than the official one. The official mechanism used to require a quite good alignment to allow turns. The knockoff mechanisms had a spring under the center pieces essentially allowing the cube to "stretch" some, which in turn allows you to force a turn with just about any misalignment up to 40 degrees. Of course these days rubiks official cubes use that same mechanism.
Comments
I was obsessed with Rubik in my youth, and I had a few of those solution tutorial books that told you all the patterns to take to solve the cube from any possible scramble.
My personal best time was 63 seconds.
I owned both official and knock-off cubes, and I found the official cube far superior, merely for reasons of coloring, and also solid construction; it was smoother and it was much less likely to explode in my hands as I cubed at top speed.
I spent inordinate amounts of time in the upstairs bathroom lubricating my cubes with a big tub of Vaseline. My parents never confronted me or even seemed to wonder what I was doing in there; I suppose it was still a bit too early for us to worry about anything morally questionable. But I did go through a lot of Vaseline.
Interestingly enough for a while the knock-off cubes were markedly better than the official one. The official mechanism used to require a quite good alignment to allow turns. The knockoff mechanisms had a spring under the center pieces essentially allowing the cube to "stretch" some, which in turn allows you to force a turn with just about any misalignment up to 40 degrees. Of course these days rubiks official cubes use that same mechanism.