I Trained with a GIANT Rubik's Cube

Hey guys , I decided this cube is my new main three by three .

Now , you might be thinking this is a bit too big to be my main three by three , but it actually fits my hands even better .

Look , it's almost the same size .

This has made me realize that normal cubes actually don't fit my hands .

They don't even fit my palm a box of important cubes , but I have to find my name before practicing and this is much easier to find , which means more practice time , which of course means more improvements and it feels really great not to turn but to get PBS because I can just keep breaking PBS with this .

Also doing , look ahead on this cube is so easy .

I never have to pause , but there is one problem I need to fix before this cube can be competition ready .

And that is the turning is a little messed up .

Do you hear that if we look at the pieces ?

So if you move from white to green here , there's actually a bump up .

And what makes this worse is the corner pieces have the same problem on this piece .

You can get caught right here .

And when you try to run the pieces against each other , they will get caught and won't move .

The problem actually is barely there at all .

And if you look at the size of the pieces , they are actually thick enough that I can just sand these off with sandpaper and it will be fine .

And this is actually nothing new to me .

I used to do this to my cubes 10 years ago .

A lot of you may remember that Diane S A this was the best cube a long time ago , but it wasn't good enough by Cuber's standards and we moded it with sandpaper to make it turn better .

So today I'm going back to my roots and modding this cube as well .

Wait , this isn't sand paper .

This is glitter .

Why do I , why do I have ?

I spent half an hour looking for this ?

Ok .

Here is the actual sandpaper .

Let's get to work .

Oh , before I start better safe than sorry , this is going to produce a lot of plastic dust .

So I'm gonna get my mask and goggles on .

Ok .

Now I'm ready .

The green side is a bit higher .

So I'll go until I don't feel that anymore .

Whoa It works .

It's like really smooth now , but it's also super scratched .

Going across is pretty smooth now , but it is super scratched up .

I have some finer sandpaper if I want to fix this at the end .

But honestly , I don't really care and this should be fine .

I'm just gonna move on to the other side and all the other pieces .

All right , the deed hasn't been done .

I've handed down the pieces and let's , let's see .

Oh , it makes a little bit of a squeaky noise just because , like I left all the scratches on .

So that's probably what's making the noise .

But the orange side was a problem before .

Let's see it .

Oh yeah , all the problem's gone .

Yes , I can still feel it a little bit sometimes but I , I think this is good enough .

I don't need it to be absolutely perfect .

I just don't want it catching when I'm turning , which is definitely not happening anymore .

But the sound is really funny .

Oh yeah .

And this cube could not , would not be my main without AJ perm logo .

Why am I doing this ?

That's just lovely .

Unfortunately , I will not be using this Cuban competition because of the rules .

Wait , there's gotta be a rule against this , right .

Come on .

Come on .

Come on , please .

Oh , ok .

I think I have an idea .

Yes .

OK .

There's a rule against this .

That's why I can't use this at a competition .

So I decided I will instead simulate a competition with all of the three by three events and I won't be doing multi blind because I only have one cube .

So I started with a three by three average of five and let me tell you , I probably should have practiced more before this because I was clearly getting better with each solve .

This cube turns much better than when I first got it .

Of course , because I sanded it down using sandpaper on the pieces .

Actually made a huge difference .

I'm definitely more confident turning and it really doesn't catch ever .

My PB going into this was actually 41 seconds .

So I shattered my PB on every single solve .

It was also really interesting learning the details in how it should be turning .

So obviously , I'm not really using finger tricks , but the U layer turns can kind of be done with your fingers depending on the situation .

And I learned that when you turn the right and left layers , it's actually easier to turn the cube towards you rather than away from you .

For example , our prime is much easier than R .

And this is really important when you do R two or L two because you can choose the direction .

There are of course , other little details in the turning , which I probably grasped intuitively .

But it's just kind of too much to think about all these finger tricks at once .

And I think these times I'm getting could be much better if I was really used to the move optimal algorithms in F two LL and PL .

But I'm definitely wasting moves by using the algorithms I normally use on a three by three .

The times I ended up getting were 37 34 20 9 , 30 36 .

So a 33.89 average , I'm sure I could get sub 30 but I am pretty happy with this .

Next was one handed and this was obviously going to be the hardest one .

I actually went in without even learning how to turn first , which was a huge mistake .

My first solve ended up being two minutes and 47 seconds .

Actually , now that I think about it , that's not even too far from my first one handed solve ever on a normal three by three cube .

Anyway , turning one handed is just terrible .

I couldn't really figure out how to do it .

I realized at some point that turning off of the table could actually help because the table doesn't get in the way of the layer .

I'm trying to turn it didn't work out so well .

And I also noticed it was kind of difficult to reorient the cube .

So a lot of the time I would just turn the cube in whatever orientation it already was in .

For example , I did a T perm from the side because it was too hard to turn the cube over .

My hands were getting very tired .

But I did find another cool trick which is if you have the last turn , don't do it because you just get a plus two second penalty .

And this is faster than doing the last turn a lot of the time .

So here was my final average .

I didn't discover about the plus two until the second solve .

And I only did four solves because my arm was starting to cramp at the end .

And I decided since you take away the best and worst solves in an official average , you don't need to do the last solve .

That was probably the smart thing to do .

And then there was blindfolded and I realized that I had to take off the logo because you're not allowed to have a logo in a competition for blindfolded solving .

The first solve actually had some easy algorithms , but I messed up somewhere .

And without muscle memory , this is really , really hard .

So I know sometimes when people do three by three slowly , it's hard to remember algorithms because you don't have the muscle memory .

But doing it blindfolded is even harder because when you solve three by three , even though you're relying on muscle memory , there's also a visual element and you kind of see where the pieces move .

So sometimes if you're lost , you can kind of figure out what the next move is .

But in blindfolded , you never get to see the cube when turning .

So it's just muscle memory and I wasn't really messing up .

But I also had to think a lot for the algorithms .

The first solve was the three minutes and 18 seconds , but it was a DNF by three edges .

So I probably just did one algorithm wrong .

Then I tried again .

And the second solve actually had some of the harder algorithms .

So I ended up spending a lot of time pausing in between steps and trying to think of a simpler algorithm than the one I usually use .

Because blindfolded algorithms are all intuitive .

You can actually just make one up on the spot .

So that's what I was doing .

And that's why there's so many cube rotations .

For example , on a smaller cube , I would just do more moves to avoid the cu rotation because it's faster that way .

But on this cube , I would just do a cube rotation plus a really simple algorithm .

And that way I would not mess up and I managed to finish the solve in three minutes and 31 seconds .

Yeah , I'm never doing this again .

Next up was fewest moves .

Yeah , I'm about to spend an hour on this .

Now in case you don't know how fewest moves works , you don't do a normal cube solve .

You actually just write down your solution on a piece of paper , but you get an hour and you also get the scramble , which means you can do a bunch of crazy things .

Obviously , you're not allowed to just reverse the scramble , but there are a lot of advanced techniques to lower the number of moves you use .

And I forgot how many turns you have to do in a fewest move solve because a lot of the time you have to res the cube .

And I was trying to avoid that .

I looked at the timer after the first time I scrambled it and it took 30 seconds .

Does 30 seconds seem like a lot .

Maybe not .

But over the course of an hour , let's say you scramble the cube 20 times .

That's already 10 minutes wasted .

So I had to change up my strategy a bit and do a little bit more writing and a little bit less turning than usual .

I did my normal amount of time management , which turns out to be wrong because I turned so much slower .

So in the end , I actually came down to the very last second .

When I circled my solution .

In the end , I got a 33 move solution , which is honestly not bad considering how hard it was to turn .

This here was the scramble and some of my work in the beginning do 10 moves .

So red , I didn't have time to do the actual turns even though you get an hour .

This was super rushed .

I had to write more than usual and do fewer turns than usual and I won't do it here .

But let's just make sure everything works .

Here is the scramble and I'll do the solution that I wrote down .

There you go .

I am not doing two more solves of this .

This is what my WC A profile would look like if this competition counted anyway , that was fun .

Just kidding .

That was not fun .

That was painful .

This cube is no longer my main .