Hand tools for a newbie woodworker

Sun 1 January 2017 2:54 PM / 1 Comment /

I’ve been getting into hand tool woodworking for the past year or two. As part of that, I’ve been putting together a set of tools mostly on an as-needed basis. I’ve gotten to the point where I feel I have most everything I need for simple frame furniture construction. Since it’s fresh in my head, I thought I’d document what articles I used for research and what tools I ended up buying based on that research.

Sources

My primary recommendation for your research is this excellent series of articles at Wood and Shop. It doesn’t dive much into specific tool models, but does give some idea of the scope of tools you’ll need as a beginner and what you might get next as you get into more complex projects.

Next, I suggest watching videos of woodworkers on YouTube. You can see what kinds of tools they use in real projects. In particular I recommend Paul Sellers’s channel. You can also see a great overview of common hand tool usage in this video from Mike Siemsen.

Beyond that, I’ll give more specific resources for each type of tool below.

In general, the recommendation I’ve found is to strongly prefer either vintage tools from before the 1940s, or brand new tools from either Lie Nielsen (Made in USA) or Veritas at Lee Valley (Made in Canada).

Older tools were expensive at the time and were very well made, but are mostly cheap now. New tools are expensive now, and also well made. New, cheap tools are what give modern tools a bad reputation: it’s not that “things were made better back in the day,” it’s that cheap crap simply wasn’t available!

So as a new woodworker looking for the best bang for your buck, you’ll want to buy vintage tools. But don’t forget that modern toolmakers making excellent tools do exist. Some vintage tools are no cheaper than their modern, high quality equivalents. It’s always worth comparing prices. New tools also have the advantage of knowing exactly what you’re going to get, and know you’re not going to have to refurbish the thing before you can use it.

What follows here is a list of tools I’ve purchased and how I decided to make those purchases.

Rough dimensioning

Here’s the tools I use for dimensioning lumber roughly to shape.

I have two full-size (26″) Disston handsaws, one 4 PPI D-8 rip cut and one 10 PPI D-7 cross cut, both manufactured around 1900. These were bought on eBay for about $30 shipped, each. The Disstonian Institute is a fantastic resource for learning about Disston saws. The author covers every Disston saw that you might want to use. There are a billion vintage saw brands, but Disston is widely recommended and plenty cheap, so I just stick with that. A less aggressive rip cut saw is on my to-buy shortlist. It may be fast, but 4 PPI is pretty brutal to the wood.

Veritas rip cut and crosscut dovetail saws, Disston D-7 crosscut, and Disston D-8 rip cut

For planing to thickness, I use my vintage Stanley No 5 plane with the iron set deep. For Stanley planes, if you’ve got the piece in hand or have good photos, you can date them with the Stanley plane dating flowchart. Again, shoot for something older than 1940. My No 5 turns out to be from the 1920s. I got it for $35 shipped on eBay.

A word on buying from eBay. Search for the tool you want, then check the “Sold Listings” filter box on the left. This will tell you what prices the tool is actually selling for. Get a good feel for the range of prices, taking into account the condition of each sold tool, then set a target condition and price for yourself. Every time you see a tool pop up in your target condition, bid your max, and forget about it. The trick is to just let the good ones go to higher bidders. If the tool is commonly sold, like most Stanley planes, you’ll eventually win one at your target price by slipping through the higher bidders. If you haven’t won one in a couple of weeks, do the price analysis again and adjust accordingly.

Flattening

My primary tool for flattening long boards is a Stanley No 8C from around 1900. I wanted a No 7, but a No 8 was available locally for $100. No cheaper than eBay, but saved me a bundle on shipping. For shorter boards, I just use the No 5.

I use home made winding sticks along with my No 5 to remove twist.

Stanley No 71 1/2 router, Stanley No 8C, Stanley No 5, Record No 4, and Lie Nielsen rabbet plane

Joinery

Once the boards are flat, it’s time for joinery.

I bought a pair of Veritas dovetail saws for about $80 each, one rip and one crosscut. This was an early purchase; these days I probably would spring for cheaper vintage backsaws on eBay. But these saws came highly recommended from a number of sources, and I didn’t know at the time how to shop for vintage tools, so they let me get started faster. I use these for cutting tenons, small cross cuts, or any other cuts on already-flattened boards.

Stanley Bailey bench chisels, Ray Iles mortising chisel, and a deadblow mallet

My bench chisels are a modern Stanley Bailey set of 5, purchased on Amazon for $70. Another early purchase, but I do somewhat stand by this one. Vintage chisels seem difficult to shop for: they are often unbranded, so you don’t really know what you’re getting. On the other hand, vintage chisels are super cheap, on the order of a few bucks apiece, so you’re not risking much.

For my first few projects, I used my bench chisels to cut mortises. A recent purchase was a single Ray Iles 5/16″ mortising chisel on eBay for $70 shipped. This thing cuts mortises way better than the bench chisels did. The straight sides of the chisel, as opposed to the beveled sides of standard bench chisels, prevent the chisel from accidentally twisting in the mortise and widening it. As I mentioned, I find shopping for vintage chisels difficult, so I opted for a high quality modern one instead. You only really need one or two mortise widths anyway, so this 5/16″ should be sufficient for most things.

I also recently purchased a Stanley No 71½ router plane, a little over a hundred years old, from Patrick Leach at The Superior Works. Patrick sells a huge range of vintage tools. He doesn’t maintain a website, instead you have to sign up for his mailing list to get the tool list each month. I bought from him partly because I was having poor luck on eBay and wanted to try a private seller. The router plane was bought for about $100 shipped, which is a little more than I would have paid for a “good deal” on eBay, but still not a bad price. I may buy from Patrick again.

Other good options for router planes are either of the ones sold by Veritas and Lie Nielsen. They’re priced both comparably with vintage Stanley routers. All three makers are slightly different and have advantages and disadvantages. Chris Schwartz wrote a great comparison review of both of the modern varieties. No clear winner here; make your own decision.

The Wood and Shop article linked above gives a glowing recommendation for the Lie Nielsen Rabbet Block Plane. I bought one of these direct from Lie Nielsen for $175, which makes this little guy my most expensive single tool. It’s great for sneaking up on the tenon width when fitting it into your mortise. The nicker blades make the necessary crosscut against your tenon shoulder to avoid tearout on the tenon surface. It’s a great little tool and I’m glad I have it. I do find it difficult to adjust the iron to be both flush with one edge and parallel to the sole. I expect I just need more practice. I think you could get away with a vintage shoulder or rabbet plane for much cheaper, but this is a nice tool.

Shaping

For doing final smoothing, I have an English-made Record No 4 from the 1950s that I bought privately from the same guy I bought the Ray Iles chisel from, $40 shipped. According to some brief research I did, Record is regarded as being slightly higher-end than Stanley, but near enough that it makes no difference. The seller kindly sharpened and honed the blade for me, and this thing takes the finest shavings leaving a great, shiny surface.

I don’t yet have a card scraper, but that’s only because I keep forgetting to drop one into the shopping cart at Lee Valley. One of these days I’ll remember.

I’d also like to get a spoke shave, but I haven’t done much research here yet. I’ve seen both vintage and modern recommended. This needs a price comparison, taking into account how much restoration needs to be done on old tools. For example, how hard is it to sharpen a vintage spoke shave?

Sharpening

Both of my hand saws required sharpening upon receipt; yours will too. On Paul Sellers’s recommendation, I buy Bahco triangular saw files from Lee Valley and shape my own handles for them. I built my own saw sharpening “vise” by sawing a kerf down the middle of some long scrap 1×1, which I then just clamp to the bench with my saw in it. I guess you can buy a vintage metal one if you’re into that.

DMT diamond plates, Bahco saw files, and a leather strop

For sharpening chisels and hand planes, I bought the three-plate diamond plate set from DMT on Amazon for $100. It comes with 325, 600, and 1200 grit diamond plates (by DMT’s measure; each manufacturer has their own standard) in a nice little box. It does well enough, but I won’t be purchasing it again when these wear out. They’re quite small for plane blades, and I really don’t like the polka dot pattern. When sharpening plane blades, you rock the blade up on each edge to give it a very slight radius. This helps prevent plane tracks in your surface, but the trouble is the corners then get caught on the polka dot indentations. I like diamond plates, so I’ll continue buying DMT. But instead, I’ll start getting their flat, and much more expensive, 8″x3″ plates. I already have one of these in 8000 grit. This will hopefully help with planing end grain, which I have been struggling with.

I also built a leather strop with some scrap leather from a local wacky goods surplus store (5 cents) nailed to a length of scrap construction grade pine I had laying around. I use some green, extra-fine buffing compound I bought on Amazon. Paul Sellers has a good sharpening video where he shows how to use a leather strop.

Measuring and marking

For rough cuts, I’ve got some old tape measure. Whatever. I’ve also got a cheapo combination square from the hardware store for making roughly-square cuts. It’s nice to have one you don’t care about, in case you drop it while shifting around rough lumber.

Big box combination square and measuring tape, home made winding sticks, Staedtler pencil and eraser, Veritas striking knife and dual marking gauge, General Tools protractor, and Starrett combination square

For careful work, I use a 12″ Starrett combination square from Amazon for about $70. The length is nice for wider boards, but I think I’d also like to pick up a 4″ or 6″ square for finer work, since the 12″ blade gets quite unweildy at smaller board sizes.

At the recommendation of the above Wood and Shop article, I picked up a Veritas dual marking gauge, but I’m not in love with this tool. I used it for marking mortises for a while, but now I just do it with my square and a pencil or marking knife, which I find much less fiddly. The furniture I’ve been building tends to be human-scale (tables, coat rack, etc) so getting absolute accuracy isn’t that important. Maybe I’ll be glad to have this when I do finer work like box or drawer making. I don’t regret it, but it spends most of its time in a drawer.

Speaking of marking knifes, I have been using some old Stanley box cutter so far. It has worked well enough, but always felt kind of clumsy. I picked up a Veritas striking knife, but haven’t yet had a chance to use it. I’ll update this with thoughts later.

Work bench

Confession time: I don’t yet have a work bench. I have some old sheets of plywood screwed together by my house’s previous owner. My solution for work holding is pipe clamps against the plywood. Yuck.

A real bench will be my first project when the weather thaws. I decided to go with Chris Schwartz’s knockdown Nicholson (sometimes called an English bench). I picked this bench for a few reasons. A big one was Schwartz’s reputation: he wrote a big book on workbenches, and this is where he ended up. Also, I wanted something quick to build and cheap. This bench has no complicated joinery, just a handful of dadoes. It’s also used in the video I linked above where Mike Siemsen shows how to use a bench with just holdfasts and no vise. Having no vise saves me a boatload of money, and I can always retrofit one later if I need. Here, have a bunch of links:

There are other workbench options. Another popular one is the Roubo bench (sometimes called a French bench). I decided against this because I want a front apron for work holding. Paul Sellers also has an excellent video series of his workbench build. This is close to what I want, but I think the Nicholson looks simpler to build.

Conclusion

This was basically a list of all the tools I own in my work shop. With a couple exceptions that I noted, I wouldn’t want to do without any of them. By carefully buying vintage tools, I’ve been able to keep costs quite low without introducing much extra refurbishing work. I’m eager for spring to come back around so I can get back to woodworking in earnest.

Posted in: Woodworking

Cheesemaking in My Home

Sun 27 September 2015 11:08 AM / 8 Comments /

I’ve been making cheese for about a year, and I’m starting to feel confident in my technique and equipment. I decided to write up this post to help others who are starting out. It’s a collection of equipment that I built or bought and how I use them to make my own cheeses at home. Using this equipment, I’ve successfully made cheeses like Colby, Gouda, and Camembert, and I think I could make many more cheeses without any further investment.

When I started cheesemaking, I wanted to avoid feeling “gouged” by buying specialty equipment. I didn’t want to spend $300 on a pre-fab cheese press, or $20 on a single shaping form when I could make those at home for cheap or free, respectively. Sure, my cheeses might not be precisely the traditional diameter or height or exact shape of the cheeses made in France, but whatever, I’m eating it, not staring at it. Below is a list of equipment and techniques that work for me. Give it a read, use what you like, and decide for yourself what you don’t like.

Five week Colby

Five week Colby

Research and recipes

First I want to throw out a huge shout-out to the folks at Cheesemaking.com. They have a huge collection of educational articles about cheesemaking, right from the start through to advanced cheeses and techniques. If you want to do home cheesemaking, just go to their website and read absolutely everything you can find. You should understand what the bacteria is doing, what rennet does, what cooking the curd does, why you press cheese, how waxing works, what an aging environment should be like, the role of bacteria as the cheese ages, and more. Cheesemaking doesn’t have many hard techniques, but it requires precision, attention, and time. Do your research and you’ll be rewarded with a successful batch, every time.

Cheesemaking.com also has a huge collection of recipes written by Jim, one of their staff members. Most of the recipes, especially the more recent ones, are incredibly detailed with pictures and temperatures, times and quantities down to the last detail. While I’ve begun adapting my own techniques for cheeses I’ve made more than once, Jim’s recipes are a fantastic starting point for your first try at a cheese. Pick out a recipe and read the instructions for it ten times before you start the process. If you don’t know what you want to make, the first recipes I followed were Colby, Gouda, and Sage Derby.

Ingredients

While I’m recommending Cheesemaking.com, I also buy most of my ingredients from them. I find their website so helpful, I want to support their business by giving them my patronage. I use their liquid animal rennet, though when I run out I’ll probably try the liquid vegetable rennet and see how well that works. I’ve been warned against tablet rennet from someplace online. I also buy my bacteria cultures and molds from them. For example, I’ve bought their mesophilic culture, geotrichum, and penicillum. All have worked great, no complaints. They seem to source at least some of their cultures from Danisco/Choozit, but I want to support Cheesemaking.com and I feel more confident that I’m ordering the right thing in appropriate quantities, so I just order from them.

Cheesemaking ingredients

Cheesemaking ingredients

I also buy my wax from them. I shopped around trying to find a good source for cheese wax, but again, the best I could find that gave me confidence was Cheesemaking.com’s offerings. I opted for the red wax, because I think it looks the most striking, but my understanding is they’re all interchangeable. I ordered five pounds, and that seems to be a good quantity for occasional home cheesemaking. It fills my wax pot about halfway (more on this later), which gives plenty for dipping wheels into. I’ll probably have to order more in another year or so, so I think ten pounds would have been overkill for my setup.

One thing you’ll figure out quickly while researching is the importance of quality milk. I’m really lucky to have a farm just a couple hours south of the Twin Cities that sells high quality milk in my local grocery store. I buy their non-homogenized (“cream line”), pasteurized milk. They sell in half-gallon, glass bottles, pictured below. I usually buy four bottles and do two-gallon batches. I have bought the non-local milk in plastic bottles, and it works, but since finding this brand I haven’t tried anything else. You should go out of your way to find the highest quality milk you can. Even though the milk I buy is high quality, I still buff it up with calcium chloride.

High quality milk

High quality milk

Pots, utensils, and other equipment

On a cheesemaking day, I’ll start by sanitizing my equipment. Equipment I use includes a whisk; a long spoon; a large ladle for soft curd cheeses; a long, serrated bread knife for curd cutting; and a few measuring spoons and cups. Nothing you don’t already have. A more specialist piece of equipment is a (very) large colander for draining curds. For sanitizing, I use 1-Step No Rinse sanitizer. I just dunk every tool in some lukewarm water with 1-Step in it, then cover them lightly with a towel so they dry while I’m bringing the milk up to temp.

Cheesemaking equipment

Cheesemaking equipment

One critically important piece of cheesemaking equipment, that you really should spend the money on, is a quality thermometer. I use a Thermoworks Thermapen. Yes, it’s expensive. It’s recommended by lots of home cooks, including the incorruptible Alton Brown, and it obviously has lots of other uses around the kitchen than cheesemaking. Just get the Thermapen, you won’t regret it.

Some day I might buy a pH meter to take some guesswork out, but I haven’t needed it yet.

There are different techniques for bringing the milk up to inoculation temp. I don’t have the room to do a water bath, so I just heat it directly on the stove. I use a medium heat, stirring every five or so minutes. The important things are to avoid scalding, and avoid overshooting your target temperature. It took a few batches to find the ideal stove setting on my stovetop to avoid scalding without taking hours to heat up. At the setting I use, it takes 15-30 minutes to bring the milk up to temp.

Cheesemaking equipment

Cheesemaking equipment

I bought some cheesecloth off of Amazon back when I started, and I still have more than half of the roll left. You do want to make sure you get a fine grade cloth. Some stuff sold as “cheesecloth” has holes around 1/8″! This will pass much of your curd straight through and down the drain. The cloth I use is grade 60, called “very fine.” When I run out and buy again, I’ll probably try to find some “butter muslin,” which I think is even finer. Shop around and see what you can find. I do hand-wash and re-use my cheesecloths for several batches. Eventually it gets kinda chunky or discolored, and then I toss it and cut a new length.

For waxing, I found a pot at Goodwill to sacrifice to the wax. After using, I just let the wax cool in the pot (pictured) and put it away for storage. I tried to find tall, narrow pot as I wanted the wax to be deep so I could dip the wheel in without hitting the bottom of the pot.

Shaping forms (molds)

I call these “forms” because the word “mold” is overloaded in a cheesemaking context. You can buy expensive, perfect, thick plastic forms online for $$$. But I’m cheap, so I just use old plastic takeout containers. One thing that is important to me, is that everything that touches the cheese must be food-safe. Plastic containers that sold food are food-safe. Perfect.

DIY Cheesemaking Forms

DIY Cheesemaking Forms

What I do is find a plastic container about 4 inches in diameter and 4-6 inches tall. One was a container from Chinese takeout. Another held shredded meat from my local butcher shop. After eating the takeout/shredded meat, I give it a very good wash and grab my scissors and cut off the bottom just above where it curves. This is now my “follower,” which is used in the press on the top of the cheese. Because of the curve of the follower, I sometimes trim off the rim that forms after pressing to keep the top edge square.

Next I grab a long nail, about 1/8″ in diameter, and a blow torch (I use my girlfriend’s culinary torch, don’t tell her), and a pair of pliers. Heat up the nail with the torch and press it through the plastic to make drainage holes. I found it works best to push from the inside out, as this will leave the rough edge on the outside where the cheesecloth won’t get caught as much. Make a hole every 3/4″ or so, all around the form.

Now you have a perfectly good cheese form, for free! Compare that to the prices online…

Making Camembert

Making Camembert. The right sheetpan is ready to receive the flip.

Cheese press

You can buy a pre-fab cheese press online for $$$$$$. Or you can build your own out of a cutting board and some stuff from the hardware store for under $50. Again, every surface that touches the cheese should be food-safe. In this case, that just means the cutting board. I followed this guide by spike3579 on Instructables, but it’s pretty trivial. Cut a couple holes in your cutting board, use a long, threaded rod and some nuts. Grab some springs, cut some wall studs to length, and put it all together.

Sage Derby in the press

Sage Derby in the press

Some tricky parts to find were the springs and circular followers, which the hardware store didn’t have. I got lucky here. There’s a wacky local chain called Ax-Man Surplus that sells all sorts of crazy crap like misspelled pint glasses, random electrical items, mannequins, whatever. They happened to have some stiff-ish springs and some wooden circles for a few cents apiece. Bingo.

Cheese press parts diagram

Cheese press parts diagram

I use a half sheetpan to catch the whey drainage. The cheese press has rubber feet in the four corners to keep it out of the drained whey. Occasionally I’ll have to drain the whey into the sink.

Speaking of drainage, when I started making Camembert, which drains under its own weight, I needed some draining mats to allow the whey to flow off. I could have bought some mats online for five bucks apiece, but instead I went to a home goods store and bought a roll of flexible shelf liner, which I cut squares out of. Works a treat, and I got many yards for the price of a single drainage mat.

Fresh Camembert

Fresh Camembert

Cheese aging fridge

Once you’ve made your cheese, you’ll need someplace to age it. I got an unused wine fridge from my girlfriend’s parents. People are selling these for a dime-a-dozen on Craigslist. They work great because they’re cheap, small (cheap to cool), and have a thermostat built in. Mine only goes down to 50 degrees, which is a little warm for some cheeses, but it’s good enough.

To keep the humidity up, I use a sponge in a plastic container that I keep a little water in. This keeps it around 70-80%RH. For cheeses like Camembert that need 90+%RH, I use a tupperware with a loose lid and stick a wet paper towel in there. I bought a Thermoworks hygrometer/thermometer and leave it in the “aging cave” to monitor actual temp and humidity. I open the door as infrequently as possible to avoid fluctuations.

Conclusion

I hope you find this helpful in getting started and saving some money. If you’ve got some feedback or even your own ideas, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Posted in: Cheese

Fez Mysteries

Wed 25 March 2015 8:45 PM / 3 Comments /

Fez is, I think, my favorite video game. I’ve beaten it to completion a small handful of times, and I’m always mournful when the whole map is gold, because that means I’m out of content. But there are a couple nagging, unsolved mysteries in Fez. This post is a summary of what we know, and what we know we don’t know, about the endgame and post-endgame of Fez.

It goes without saying that this post is full of spoilers. In fact, it contains nothing but spoilers. If you haven’t beaten Fez, there’s nothing for you here. But it’s a three-year-old game, so I think the statute of limitations has passed. Below you’ll find a discussion of some of the larger mysteries of Fez, both solved and unsolved.

If there’s something you think I missed or got wrong, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

The Heart Cube Conspiracy

The Language

Fez has English dialog coded with a simple cypher. It is clearly intended, but optional, for most users to be able to decode this language. There is even a stone block reading (in code) “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” in front of a languorous canine being leapfrogged by Vulpes vulpes.

It turns out that the language is completely superfluous except for one puzzle. You can complete every puzzle in the game, save one, without decoding the language. In fact, I never decoded any of the dialog in any of my playthroughs. Transliterating just isn’t my idea of fun. The puzzle that requires language skills is known as the “security room” puzzle.

fez_security_sm

In the security room, there’s a floating rectangular prism which has two messages. The first reads

PLEASE ANSWER THIS SECURITY QUESTION WHATS MY NAME

The second reads

SECURITY QUESTION HINT MY FIRST HALF IS WHAT IT IS MY SECOND HALF IS HALF OF WHAT MADE IT

Then, there’s a jumble of random letters on blocks below.

The answer is given as a concatenation of “meta” and “tron.” Meta is data about data, or “is what it is.” “Tron” is the second half of the name of the company which made Fez: Polytron. And indeed, that’s almost certainly the correct way to come to this conclusion.

There’s a handful of Christian and Judaic hints in this solution and in the tome’s translation, but they don’t mean much to me. I shy away from numerological answers, since they can lead anywhere you want to, so I feel those fit more into the “flavor” category than into the “puzzle hint” category.

The Monolith

The monolith was probably the first major Fez mystery. There is a treasure map in the game which is burnt in half. The half you find has a button combo code on it, and an indication of where to stand in an otherwise empty room. After you enter that code while standing in the center of one of two circles, a black rectangular prism floats up out of the ground and spins while hanging in mid-air. There is no indication of what to do next.

fez_monolith_sm

Some intuition leads one to conclude that you should stand in the other circle and enter some other code. But what code? That’s our first still-unsolved mystery: how do we find this code? People have brute forced it. In fact, it was kind of a fun community effort back when the game first came out.

But brute forcing the solution feels wrong. One could brute force all of the codes in the game, but there are always solutions derived from game logic. Is brute forcing really the correct method for this one? Far more satisfying would be a concrete and obviously correct solution derived from clues found within the game, or from its real world paraphernalia.

There’s lots of guesses for how we were intended to discover this code. The popular one is some crazy derivation of the release date, though that’s got a few holes in it. Maybe some “black box” transformation function? No one knows.

The trouble is all these “solutions” seem like they’re working backwards. There’s no way to know which solution, if any, is the intended solution to this puzzle. In fact, maybe brute forcing was the correct solution after all! Poke the black box with enough inputs until something pops out. All these proposed solutions might be backwards justifications for a puzzle that never existed. There’s no way to know without finding another hint, or some feedback from Polytron. For the time being, it remains unsolved, three years after the game’s initial release.

The Observatory

This is a fun one, and it has the benefit of being solved. There’s an observatory with a telescope in the late game of Fez. You can view the stars at nighttime through this telescope. There’s the usual tetromino-based puzzle, but solving it won’t turn the room gold on the map. There’s something more.

Through the telescope, you can find two blinking, red dots, one to the bottom-left and one to the upper-right. If you record them, these actually spell out a 96-bit piece of data. Split that into bytes and decode into 8-bit ASCII and you end up with a sequence of L and R characters that spell out a code. Brilliant and incredibly hard to solve… except there’s a mistake. If you just tap left and right in time with the red lights as they blink, you’ll end up solving it anyway due to a substring of the bits matching the same L and R sequence. Whoops.

The Heart Room

So, what prize do these three difficult puzzles result in? For each, a Red Heart Cube. Your companion, Dot, acknowledges the first heart cube you receive with a bewildered reaction. What on Earth is this thing for?

After solving all of the other puzzles in the game and receiving 64 cubes, you finally open a door accessible fairly early on in the game. This leads to the Heart Room, where your three Heart Cubes assemble to form a pretty heart.

fez_heart_sm

This heart is actually the logo of an indie gaming collective that Fez’s designer, Phil Fish, was a part of. Just a little Easter egg for diehard fans? Yes, but…

The Heart Disintegration Codes

This is where the mysteries kick into high gear. After a while, Fez was eventually released for the PC, which opens up all sorts of hacking avenues. People have long since reverse-engineered the game’s data formats and begun data-mining the game for anything that hasn’t yet been discovered.

There are two artifacts in the game that are designed to give you hints towards the language and number systems in the game. These are referred to as the letters cube and the numbers cube, as they show you how to draw each letter and each number. You can look at and rotate these items in your inventory. Through reverse engineering, one player found codes for each artifact that can be entered only while standing in the Heart Room. You look at each artifact, enter a certain sequence of L and R button presses, and then…

the heart dissolves into space.

What does this mean? How were we supposed to find these codes? Significantly, they’re the only codes in the entire game that are entered in the menu screens.

One theory, my favorite, is that discovering these codes is only possible through reverse engineering. By entering these codes, that means that you must have broken apart the game to examine its insides, and you have effectively “broken the developer’s heart” by tearing into the game’s internals. You’re cheating. Your reward is an empty room after the heart breaks to pieces and disappears. Jerk.

There is one small piece of supporting evidence for this theory. Entering the code on the original, Xbox 360 release will break your save game. This looks to me like an unfinished piece of the game. The functionality is still present, but there is no way to discover the code except by reverse engineering. Perhaps they forgot to playtest this non-feature while trying to fix some of the notorious save-game bugs, leading to the corruption observed by players who enter this “unofficial” code.

There are other theories. Crazy numerology? Something to do with stereoscopic mode? Just like the monolith code, no one knows, and it’s impossible to know without further data. Another unsolvable mystery.

The Classroom Numbers

There’s a significant room in the game where the number system is spelled out. The mystery here is a long set of digits present in that very classroom, which have no use in or out of the game, to anyone’s knowledge.

fez_numbers_sm

The numbers are transcribed as:

2 4
2 5
3
  6
4 1
5 4
4 4
3 3 
3 6
5

Most text in Fez is read top-to-bottom-right-to-left, so something like “45 614436” and “223 454335”.

Numbers in Fez work strangely. There are multiple representations for the same digit. The number four can be represented with both a single line to the left (“four”) or with two lines, one up (“one”) and one down (“plus three”). This is straightforward enough. After a little practice it’s easy to read any number the game gives you, and you never need to write your own. Perhaps significantly, the number four is written in both manners in this snippet. Maybe it’s just gibberish for you to practice reading numbers? Maybe it’s a secret hint at the monolith code? Perhaps you can somehow derive the heart disintegration codes from these sigils? Letter coordinates to some unknown corpus? A café in Montreal?

Lesser Mysteries?

The above is, in my opinion, a complete list of mysteries remaining in Fez. I think these are all questions to which an answer exists that we don’t have.

Below are some more gray area, open ended questions. In my opinion, they’re dead ends. Leftover artifacts from unused puzzles, or just design elements that people are reading too much into.

The Soundtrack Images

Fez’s outstanding music was written by Disasterpeace. Downloading the soundtrack and running it through a spectrogram analysis (a visual representation of audio frequencies across time) yields images. As far as I can tell, no one has gotten anywhere with these. You can find some descriptions of what is represented in the image, but there’s no real hook back into the game. Neil Armstrong? Harry Truman? Huh?

I think there might be something here, but I think it’s just too esoteric. It’s just too open-ended to come up with any interesting conclusions. Any guess is just that: a guess. There’s nowhere to go, here. It’s a dead end without any more info.

The Tome

One of the artifacts you acquire in the game, along side the letter and number cubes, is a book. It’s a long book, written in Fez’s cypher language, and worse, it’s scrambled. It can be unscrambled (see the Ars Technica article linked above for the process), but doesn’t really yield anything interesting. The “release date theory” of the monolith code depends on the unscrambling order, but as I described, I don’t really buy that theory.

Is the tome just a bit of incredibly hard to find flavor text? That’s my guess.

One larger problem is the letters written on the back (verso) of each page. From the front of the book to the back, these spell out PAEAEBUB. Huh? Repeated letters mean they’re not “page numbers” of any sort. So… what are they?

The Skull

The final artifact you get is an ancient skull from a precursor to the current civilization. This skull has no use in the game whatsoever. The skull shape is referenced a couple times, in the ancient civilization areas, and, oddly, in the boiler room in the first village. But… then what? Reverse engineering has turned up nothing to do with the skull. Is it just flavor? I guess so…

fez_skull_sm

Concentric Rings

Scattered throughout the game are flat textures depicting concentric, white rings. There’s one image containing one ring, one containing two rings, and so on up to eight rings. All of these rings are written on the floor and can only be seen in first-person mode. One cannot be seen inside the game, ever. This one is on the Fractal stage in the forest, the only room where the rotation mechanism is locked by the rotating totem in the center of the stage. First-person mode doesn’t work here, so you can’t see the rings on the floor.

fez_rings_sm

Is there something here? Maybe, but I can’t imagine what. The fact that one of them isn’t even viewable makes me think it’s just a design pattern, or possibly a leftover from a half-baked puzzle. Nothing significant, in my opinion.

So Now What?

To the best of my knowledge, these are all of the significant loose ends in Fez. In my opinion, we won’t find any obviously correct solutions to any of the mysteries presented above. At best we can rank our guesses in order of plausibility. It’s a bit unsatisfying, in my opinion. So much thought was put into the puzzles in this game, that it tears at me that we have puzzles whose solutions we’ll never know. I feel like there’s more we can discover here, but it just hasn’t been laid out in a way that is intelligible. I think the only way we’ll be able to definitively put these to rest is if someone in a position of authority gives us nudges in the right direction, or tells us if we’re barking up the wrong trees.

Posted in: Gaming

First Camembert results

Thu 26 February 2015 6:24 PM / Leave a Comment /

Here’s the results from my first Camembert. I cracked open one of the two wheels tonight. Aged just under three weeks.

2015_camembert_done_2

It turned out looking gorgeous. Dense, fine white fuzz that packed down to a smooth surface. A nice gentle grid pattern from the racks they aged on.

The cheese is very runny. Basically no solid center, just runny the whole way through. I think that’s because the wheels are so thin at about 1.5 cm in height. The mold was able to break down the milk solids all the way through in no time. I suspected from the start that I’d run into this problem. The inside of the cheese is basically pure white, it didn’t develop a yellow or cream color.

2015_camembert_done_1

The overriding flavor of the cheese is salt. I ate it on some bread, as shown, and it tasted mostly like salt on bread. But when I ate the cheese plain, the flavor really did come through. Still salty, but it had a bit of the creamy mushroom you expect from Camembert. A good, clean flavor, but very mild. The rind attached firmly to the innards and is moderately toothy.

I’m going to let my other wheel age at least another week, maybe two or three, before breaking into it. It’ll probably be super runny, but maybe it will develop some more flavor with the longer aging.

Lessons learned? With forms this size, maybe just do one wheel of Camembert from a one-gallon batch instead of two. I think this will give me the correct height, though the wheel will be pretty huge. Maybe tone down the salt, although I wonder if the extra saltiness comes from the small wheel size, too. I used the full amount of salt recommended by the recipe I used, and the small wheels may have thrown the ratio off.

Not a failure, but not as good as I was hoping. I’m interested to see what another couple weeks does for the flavor.

Posted in: Cheese