ORONO – If you look closely at the silver ring Rick Eason wears on his right hand, you’ll see that it’s a puzzle. When he removes it from his finger, it cascades into interlocking rings.

“I got it from a guy who lives in Mongolia,” he said, as he deftly reassembled the ring and put it back on his finger.

Eason is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Maine, where he has worked for 14 years.

The ring is only one small example of the 1,000 puzzles in Eason’s collection. He has acquired mechanical puzzles made of wood, ceramic, metal, string and plastic, and combinations of those materials.

He has wooden interlocking puzzles shaped like elephants, guns, spheres, crocodiles, cubes, rabbits, blocks, boxes and the Empire State Building, to name just a few.

Some of the metal puzzles in his collection look like instruments of torture from the days of the Inquisition. Others resemble works of art, especially the wooden puzzles designed and made by the Mr. Puzzle company of Australia.

Eason’s puzzles fit into a variety of classifications, including put-together puzzles, take-apart puzzles, disentanglement puzzles and sequential movement puzzles.

“Compared to some,” Eason said of his collection, “mine is small. Some people have 28,000.”

Many of the wooden puzzles in Eason’s collection resemble sculpture and are beautiful to look at. Their beauty, and touching and manipulating the puzzle pieces, Eason said, is just a small part of puzzle fascination.

“I’m not an art kind of guy,” he said, “but tactile and aesthetic elements are definitely reasons why some people like puzzles. Plus it’s nice to have something to play with.”

Puzzles, he said, have layers of appeal, including solving, designing, engineering and manufacturing. Eason does all of that, but his favorite aspect is solving puzzles, and the intellectual challenge it offers.

When Eason was growing up in Oak Ridge, Tenn., his grandmother had a few sequential movement puzzles – made of plastic – which she kept for her grandchildren to play with when they came to visit.

His boyhood interest in those puzzles got a boost when the mania for the Instant Insanity puzzle manufactured by Parker Brothers, which sold 12 million copies in 1966-67, hit the toy market. “I made my own version of the Insanity puzzle when I was 13 or 14,” Eason said. That puzzle is now part of his collection, as are some of the puzzles that belonged to his grandmother.

By the 1970s, Eason was collecting designs for making puzzles, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that he began to think about collecting puzzles.

While some collectors, specialize in the kinds of puzzles they collect – cube shapes, or sequential movement puzzles, or one-of-a-kind collector’s editions, for example – Eason’s collection incorporates all kinds, including a ceramic pitcher with holes in its neck, from which the puzzle solver must drink without spilling any liquid.

Eason’s interest in puzzles, and in collecting them, is nurtured by his participation in the International Puzzle Party. Membership in the IPP is for serious collectors, by invitation only.

The annual IPP meetings rotate among Europe, the United States and Japan. Eason has attended meetings in London, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Antwerp. Next year the Puzzle Party is in Chicago.

“Quite often a magician entertains at the Puzzle Party,” Eason said. “I guess, if you think about it, magic is a puzzle Something vanishes. How do you get it back?”

A highlight of the IPP is the puzzle exchange, and in order to take part in it, Eason began to design and manufacture his own puzzles. He came up with four original designs, with variations. He uses computer software he wrote to assist with puzzle design and solutions. Then he fashions the cube-shaped puzzles of maple and walnut.

Following IPP rules, which state that puzzles brought for exchange must be an original design and can be solved, Eason took his 100 handmade puzzles to the puzzle exchange. He swapped them for 100 other puzzles, a move which gave a substantial boost to the number of puzzles in his collection.

One benefit of solving puzzles is that it hones spatial reasoning and problem solving skills, he said.

“I’d like to see teachers incorporate puzzles in their classrooms, especially at the fifth- and sixth-grade level,” he said.

Orono Middle School teacher Deb Soderberg used puzzles Eason loaned her in her sixth- grade math class for a week last year.

“It was a fun, hands-on way for my pupils to learn and they were really engaged,” she said. Solving the puzzles gave pupils repeated practice in figuring out solutions, and deepened their understanding of problem solving.

In addition to solving the puzzles, pupils were asked to describe in writing how they arrived at the solution. Combining math and writing skills, Soderberg said, satisfies the criteria of the Maine Learning Results. She plans to use puzzles in her classroom again this year.

Eason has a selection of puzzles provided by the Binary Arts company available for loan to area teachers.

He can be reached at 581-2242. As for his own collection, he’s looking forward to making it grow.

“I ask for them for Christmas,” he said.