Someone has given me pieces of broken 3 X 3 Rubik’s cube keychain because I said that I wanted to take the pictures of the colourful pieces.  Now it is coming to the end of the Chinese calendar year, it is time to throw away unwanted things, before I throw them away, it is the time for me to shoot and blog about the poor colourful pieces.

Yes, it is a Chinese tradition to throw away unwanted things before a Chinese new year.  When I drove pass housing area recently, I can see that many Chinese houses have a lot more rubbish than usual outside their house waiting for the rubbish truck to come and collect them.  Most of the rubbish are boxes, some of them even throw away their old electrical appliances and sofa.  Sometimes it attracts some secondhand goods collector who thought themselves lucky because they found valuable / usable things, bring them home and make the goods belong to themselves.

[This photo was taken using my light box where a low-front-angle light plus a reflector were used.]

I believed that this keychain was bought from a discount store because of its poor quality.  If you want to enjoy playing Rubik’s cube, you should get a better quality Rubik’s cube.

I have bought a few cheap Rubik’s cube, they were either cannot be turned smoothly, or they break into pieces easily.  Until I bought my collection of high quality 3X3, 4X4 and 5X5 Rubik’s cube, I felt the actual differences.  From the manual, it even stated how to do the maintenance such as lubrication that need to be applied.

No wonder the world record Rubik’s cube solver can solve it in a few seconds.  :P  My fastest record is about 5 minutes to solve a 3X3 Rubik’s cube by looking at the formula.  I am still slow, and I can only remember the formula until the 2nd layer only.

This is the backbone of the Rubik’s cube.  I hope this won’t happen to my 3X3, 4X4, and 5X5 Rubik’s cube.  They are branded and not cheap.  Until now, I still haven’t solved my 4X4 and 5X5 Rubik’s cube.  I hope that I can make them return to their original state one day.