Bill's description

"This burr has 5 rods in each of 6 directions. I think of this design as having rods perpendicular to the sides of a regular dodecahedron. In an analagous fashion, one might think of the 6-piece burr as having rods perpendicular to a cube; and the Hectix puzzle of Stewart Coffin (or my Hexagonal Porcupine) as having rods perpendicular to the sides of a regular tetrahedron or a regular octahedron.
The rods in this puzzle should more properly be pentagonal in cross-section, but this would be harder to manufacture."