Endless Cubing Fun

2020-02-18 3 min read Cubing My stuff Teknikal_Domain Unable to load comment count

Hey as long as we’re going to be talking about the things I like to play with, we might as well get this one over with too, right?

Now show of hands, who’s surprised that I have a few of these sitting around?

First off, let’s get the numbers out of the way first… PB of 32.15, Roux method. Anyways, let’s talk cubes.

GiiKER i3s

Now this is a special one indeed… those little headphone things aren’t just for show, they have a purpose: it’s a charger. Yes, this is an electronic cube. More specifically, it’s Bluetooth enabled, and you can use the companion Supercube app to be your timer. It doesn’t support the Roux solving method, but does support the more common LBL and CFOP methods. For those two, it will actually be able to show statistics about your particular solve and how long each step took to complete.

This does come with one downside: it can’t be adjusted. It is magnetic and has a satisfying click as a layer falls into place, but there is no way to adjust the friction on it at all. Luckily for me, the factory default is perfectly enjoyable, albeit just a little different than the other cube that I got used to… which we’ll talk about right now.

GAN356 X

Good cube. By itself, nothing too spectacular, though it is stickerless. What you’re seeing is colored plastic, not stickers, meaning it can’t get scratched / peeled off. The interesting part is when you look in the box:

The cube is tensioned with springs that are interchangeable between four different stiffness levels, and each spring can be set into three different levels of pre-compression, giving 12 total steps from loose to tight that can be changed per side. On top of that, there’s a set of magnets that have four strengths: low, medium, high, and none, if you don’t want a magnetic cube. Every single pair of magnets is able to be swapped out easily, just like the little spring modules.

Yes it’s pricey, but the amount of customization is just insane. Be careful, removing the springs means there’s no tension, and it can and will just explode on you without any structural integrity, leaving you to pick up the pieces and rebuild it, good thing that it’s insanely simple to rebuild. While the magnets in the edges are swappable, the ones in the corners are permanent, so you can at least use them to slowly stick it back together piece by piece until it’s whole and able to be re-sprung.