When your partner randomly announces one day "I think we should get into making dice"
When your partner randomly announces one day "I think we should get into making dice"
Get into making dice we did! We started off just trying to make basic moulds from store bought dice, and somehow that ended up with investments into a 3d printer, pressure pot and compressor, learning to CAD our own "dice mould moulds", and so many hours spent polishing the damn things by hand.
There are now more dice in our house than we could ever use in a lifetime, but they are very pretty, so success I guess?
I really like the red and green swirl ones. For a while I was getting nothing but dice making videos on tiktok and it's amazing what some people come up with! Some had like liquid centres with glitter snd I always wondered if they would end up being a loaded die 🤔
Do you find any favour certain numbers? How do you make sure they are completely even?
There are a few ways to test but the one we usually go with is to fill a cup of water and add LOADS of salt, so the dice float. Then you can sort of poke at the floating die so it rolls around in the water, and record which side ends facing up. We test over 1000 rolls. Yes it is exactly as exciting as it sounds.
Most of these are just plain resin of different colours so no worries there for the most part. But we did do a set that was stuffed with tiny skulls made of a different sort of resin, and the first set were massively weighted towards the 1 face which in hindsight made sense due to them being made with the 1 at the top of the mould and the skulls sinking to the other side.
We did manage to do a second run of those though with much more thought put into how the skulls were placed, and those were fine :D
Sidenote though you'd be surprised how weighted a lot of store bought dice actually are, we tested some for comparison and 🤯
That sounds tedious! I had no idea how it was done but that water method sounds better than rolling 1000 times. Off to test my dice and probably get bored after 20 tests
Oh no, they're doomed! DOOMED! The click-clack math rocks have grabbed their souls, all is lost!
Please don't give my partner any ideas
What’s the process? The dice don’t look printed to me, so are you 3D printing molds and then pressing material onto them?
So we designed our own set of master dice with our font and logo in Fusion360 CAD software, then 3d print them on an Elegoo Mars 2 Pro. The masters need SO MUCH polishing, it's a nightmare, but otherwise you're just gonna make more work for yourself in future stages.
Then we also designed and printed what we persist in calling our "dice mould moulds" we use to make silicone moulds from the master dice. This pic shows us doing a set without numbers (for making fancy insert dice) but you get the idea.
THEN once the moulds are made we can actually get to the fun part of pouring pretty resin into them (and then spend hours more polishing the resulting dice, phew!)
That is very interesting and also sounds extremely tedious. I am familiar with quality resin molds, but even then there are small printing imperfections. The kind of thing I don’t process out but I can see why you’d have to do it for dice.
Do you measure or calibrate weights and the end to ensure truly random dice or is that part kind of YOLO?
Those are gorgeous! It sounds like a super fun hobby.
As someone who's had that "I should try making my own dice!" thought way too many times, but being super intimidated by it, is there an easy way to try it without buying all the extra gear? Any tips?
Thanks! Honestly, at first all we did was buy some silicone and make a mould from cheapo store bought dice, it was fun but the problem is always bubbles. We tried alllll the tips to get a bubble free result but sadly there's just no way to get them properly clear without a pressure pot.
That said, we still had fun and we've kept those early attempts as souvenirs, you can definitely at the very least find out if the hobby is fun for you before investing any further.
these are fantastic, well done!
Thanks! There's a LOT of hours of tedious polishing in this pic 😅
They look great! I came across this fantastic video a while ago, take a look https://youtu.be/5HVK55hEtjk
Oh wow that is beautiful! Bit beyond our skill level, of course :D