Solving a 7X7 Rubiks Cube has been on my list of projects for a while now. I finally solved it last week for the first time and have been solving it a few times a day since. I even made this cool pattern
Learning to solve a 3X3 cube took me a few days. I worked on it for many hours and got my average time down to around a minute. A lot of people can do it faster than this, but I’m very happy with my progress so far!
But, then the same thing happened that happens when I learned to juggle. I learned to juggle three balls and then wanted to learn four. Then five.
So after solving a 3X3 for a long time I was given a 5X5 as a gift, and went about learning how to solve it. I played with it from time to time for 9 months. I found it very difficult. But I finally found myself on bed rest for a week and was able to devote some time to it. Even being quite good at a 3X3 cube it took me three or four days to get the hang of a 5X5. This may also have been partially due to the high number of pain meds I was on.
The most difficult part of solving a 5X5 was what is called a “parody”. It’s when pieces are in the wrong place and normal methods can’t solve them. Once I got those figured out it was much easier! Here’s a post about when I learned this: https://chainsawjuggling.com/5×5-rubiks-cube-parody-solve/
So, naturally soon I wanted to learn to solve a 7×7 Rubik’s cube. I was given one for Christmas last year. Again it sat around occasionally being played with for months. 10 months. Finally i went looking for how too solve it.
Overall, I found the 7X7 to be roughly the same as the 5X5. The parody is solved the same, except that you sometimes need to turn more parts than in a 5X5. But if you understand the 5X5 it shouldn’t be too difficult to figure it out.
Oddly, the most difficult part of solving the 7X7 for me was doing the centres. So, I made a quick video of me showing how I move pieces of the centres.
So, you solve the centres this way, then solve the edges like in a 5X5, and then solve like a 3X3.
Easier said than done, but that’s what worked for me!
I went through many websites to try and figure this out. Here’s a link to the page that helped the most: https://www.jaapsch.net/puzzles/cube7.htm