Rubik's Cube for Beginners
Step 3: Insert Second Layer Edges
To put the second layer edges in, find an edge in the top layer that does not have yellow (or your top-layer color) on either sticker. That edge will have two stickers - one in the U-face, and one on the side face. Look at the color of the sticker on the side, and turn the top layer until that sticker matches the color of the center directly under it.This is the start position.
| State 1 | State 2 | State 3 |
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| U' F' U F U R U' R' | U R U' R' U' F' U F | Do either the algorithm for state 1 or 2 to get the piece out, and then do the correct algorithm to put the piece back in correctly. |
If an second layer edge is in the wrong place in the second layer, insert the correct piece to get it out. If all the second layer edges are in the wrong place in the second layer, insert any edge from the top layer to get one of the edges out.
When you are done, your cube should look like this:
Explanation
We can break up each algorithm into two steps: (1) removing the corner from the bottom and (2) putting the corner back in with the edge.
Removing the corner:
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| Starting position | U' is an important move that puts the edge in the proper position for the following moves. | Now we take out the corner using the reverse of the previous step (F' U F). Observe that this connects the corner with the second-layer edge. |
Now that the corner is out, we have to put it back in. However, we can't use F' U' F from the previous step because that will undo what we just did! We want a way to put that corner back that also puts the edge back.
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| Starting position | U moves the connected corner-edge pair out of the way for the next move. | R brings up another edge from the bottom layer. | U' connects these together. | R' puts everything back. |