A funny story about the cube
Daniel Evans (UK)
One day in early 2015 I had got a new 3×3 for Christmas; a Moyu Aolong and it was OK but was not what I expected and may well have been a fake. I heard that if you loosened the tensions, cubes could be faster. So I tried it out and my cube was way faster, but it popped a lot. I decided to leave the tensions really loose and went into school. I solved it in under 40 seconds so I thought it was great and then went to run Cubing club again.
I raced with my new cube and did not win but did quite well. I then went to the centre of the classroom and scrambled the cube. Then it popped, but the pop was different from normal; it was like an explosion. All the pieces came apart, some flying across the classroom. It was a surprise no one was hurt as all the pieces came off. Many of the pieces broke up into the 2 halves for edges and the three thirds for corners, making it even harder to fix. But I knew I could fix the cube; I just needed to find all the pieces. So I went searching and found all except 4. I asked the teacher to search for the remaining piecesbut she did not find any.
Later I found another piece but to this day I have never found the remaining three pieces; they probably went high onto the window latch of the building and got taken by the caretaker eventually. But still I did not learn my lesson. I ordered a new cube of the same type. It was smaller but faster and I loosened the tensions nearly as much and it was faster. I still refused to lubricate it instead. Years later I got a DNF for a corner twist at a competition and that taught me not to loosen the tensions so much, but it also falsely taught me that that cube was bad, but actually I had mistreated it.