Name: How This Guy Makes the World's Best Puzzle Boxes | Obsessed | WIRED
Uploaded: 2025-11-23T00:42:08.000Z
Duration: 11 min 40 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Meet Kagan Sound, a multi award winning woodworker and artist who's mastered the craft of designing and fabricating intricate wooden puzzle boxes.

There's one I made that was a 5000 move box, but

it took so many moves it would just wear itself out before you could really open it successfully.

You could open it a few times, but the wooden parts would just wear out.

No nails, just carefully interlaced wood and some glue kaging can build eye catching riddles that are a true challenge to solve.

This is the hedgehog is currently locked.

Each piece has essentially a notch and a slider underneath.

They block each other until they're moved out of the way.

So every time I move a piece, it's unlocking the next piece to move which unlocks the next piece.

My favorite feature of this is actually not all the sliding moves, but

the way that the lid comes off by twisting.

I find that really surprising and really satisfying.

It has a sort of tension to it that's really beautiful.

This box is called the Hex Flex and this is how you unlock it.

This is a box that I really pushed the boundaries on the material in an absolutely insane direction.

The box was in the international Puzzle Party design competition.

It took both top awards, therefore making it the puzzle of the year 2023.

So not only is it an amazing puzzle, it's an amazing box.

And each of these puzzles begins its life in Kagan's home wood shop.

But as far as woodworking is concerned, I'm entirely self taught at that.

All the tools over in this area are for processing the wood and breaking it down into smaller and smaller bits.

Over here I'm usually testing out finishes.

A lot of times if I can determine a finish for a particular kind of wood, it will unlock project in itself.

Moving over here, we have one of the current projects underway.

And in order to solve it, you actually have to find just the right spot to push to pop out a bookmark.

And then it's used actually to unlock the box itself.

So as the work flows over in this direction here, these are tools for cutting little miniature tracks and miniature notches into the working parts.

As the box comes together, I start to grab more and more hand tools to do the fine tuning of the piece and Then the main stage, where everything's taking place in a project really is my workbench here.

As this piece comes together, it'll look something like this, which has a final finish on it and functions as a puzzle box.

I named it after the pattern of pluses on the top that I created out of two different colors of wood.

The clicking mechanism is created entirely by wooden part.

It has an actual wooden spring that clicks into little notches.

I have an example of the wooden spring in a mechanism that rotates but accomplishes the same thing.

The spring is this little chunk of wood in here with little notches cut in it, and

it will click when it hits this notch area here.

And really, all it is is just a piece of wood with a few lines cut into it from opposing directions.

So that's the same spring that's inside of this box.

In Multiple Kagan's newest creation, the cafe wallbox, is in process in his workshop, ready to be actualized.

I have the four basic walls of what will become my puzzle box.

I've now put in a very thick, big saw blade that's going to cut notches into the wood, and

the notches are going to create the joinery that holds together those two rectangles and creates the corner edge of these boxes.

This cut will need to be at an angle so that I can make what's called a dovetail track.

It's a shape of a trapezoid, the function of housing a slider that's also a trapezoid.

it will stay attached to the box but have the ability to go back and forth.

So that was just one side of each of the trapezoid notches.

I'm going to cut the other side of that same notch now.

Now what I'm going to do is take these little pieces of wood with my notches and use this tool called the router, to remove all the material in between these two little notches I made after machining notches into these pie wood, I now have a dovetail track.

After machining, I'll have to come around with a chisel to trim leftover fuzzy material or parts that the machine couldn't get to and make it a clean, precise dovetail track.

This kind of detailed woodworking is a true passion for Kagan, but

his love of puzzles began long before he was building with wood.

I had always loved puzzles, but when I first saw a puzzle box.

It was a whole nother level of puzzle interest.

The first ones I ever made, I was in middle school, and I didn't even have wood.

It was just a box that had a move to open, but you couldn't see it.

So I carried that thought with me all the way to college and then just was dying to create this out of wood.

I'm almost more proud of myself for just getting myself into a place to build that box.

It represents a lot to me, a lot more than just building.

It was the path of finding the tools and the passion of wanting that design to be.

The pinwheel box, this is working entirely on a principle in puzzles called coordinate motion.

they all move into each other in such a way that they also move out of the way of each other.

So each of these panels that's rectangular has a diagonal movement that goes towards the other.

So this panel right here wants to move diagonally towards this, and

then this one moves diagonally towards that.

And when they all move diagonally at the same time, it allows them to.

To shift in a simultaneous dance together.

There are some puzzles I have that it would take me a while to unloc, and

So as I'm designing these puzzle boxes, a lot of it is just contemplative.

I'm just sitting thinking about how these things move in my head.

I really don't get too carried away drawing it in detail.

I'll mostly just do very rough sketches, sometimes a sequence of moves, but

I keep it very loose in order to give myself flexibility, because the designs really change a lot.

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How This Guy Makes the World's Best Puzzle Boxes | Obsessed | WIRED

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