Fold-out dice box (and dice tower)

Oh, that’s really neat! I’m glad you could get the file to behave. Nice work!

Huge thanks! I was just about to buy a design as my son dropped “Hey do you think we could make a dice tower for my friend’s birthday for Monday”, tonight. Looking forward to cranking one out over the weekend.

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Thank you for sharing this!!:heart_eyes:

Thanks for a great pattern! I used PG maple 1/8; it fit perfectly with glue only needed for the backplate. I would have had an Inkscape resize issue but it worked fine once I exported as a plain svg. My son wanted to make it for his dungeon masters, the artwork is his. I took the dice image off the web.

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Very cool! :grinning:

A co-worker has assisted me with getting my replacement :glowforge: set up, and as a thank you I cut this dice tower for him. He is very active in the Extra Life charity, which is gamers playing games to raise money for children’s hospitals. It’s a very worthwhile cause, and the dice tower was very apropos. Here is my dice tower with the extra-life logos on it. I was able to use the most updated version from @dan that had the no-glue, serrated tabs. He really loved it and asked for a bunch more for upcoming events. Thanks for the design!

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Awesome!

I *might * have gone a bit overboard on this… But why not make something cool while you’re experimenting with different materials/techniques (metallic spray paint on MDF, with felt added after to be nice to the dice and keep it quieter).

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Perfect execution. Love the cork.

Another dice tower for the Extra-Life charity event coming up in month or so, which will be used in the silent auction. They loved the previous versions made on draftboard, so I thought I’d try some multi-colored acrylic. Here is the latest in clear and blue.

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That’s beautiful! I love the design.

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Thank you so much for this!

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I love this…did you adjust the design for kerf?..if not, how did you stay so neat with the glue?

If that’s Dan’s take on the dice tower (he made some neat improvements), it doesn’t need glue. Just a little Persuasion, which is what I call my jeweler’s hammer.

This has been on my “to make” list for eons…finally got around to it, in time for them to be Christmas gifts to each of my kids’ families. :slight_smile:

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The wolf/rose design was purchased from Etsy. The SVG was 'way complex, so I just used the PNG instead and engraved it, then filled the engrave with acrylic paint before removing the masking.

The dragon is from All Silhouettes, which seems to be defunct now. :cry: I scored the shape and painted it with alcohol ink. The rose was also painted with alcohol ink.

The trays are lined with leather, finished to match the designs.

EDIT: Please ignore the following paragraph – I apparently made some scaling errors along the way that introduced errors that weren’t in the original design! I made a few minor tweaks to the design (version 3.1, but not the one with the serrated tabs) – I narrowed the slots to be a closer fit for the thickness of PG ply (just my own preference!), and corrected the tab spacing on a couple of the angled pieces that didn’t fit quite right for me. Oh, and shaved a tad off the bottom lid to allow the tray to open to a full 90 degrees. :slight_smile:

I was planning to try covering the sides with veneer, but ran out of time. Next round!

It’s a great design, and one I’ll definitely be using again and again – thanks for sharing it with the community!

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Very nicely done, @geek2nurse! I love how those turned out, and I hope your family did too. The designs you chose are especially striking, and the color turned out really well.

Also, thank you for the feedback on the design. I’d love to know some more about the design changes and misaligned tabs for my next revision: for instance, Fusion360 tells me that the basement door can extend to slightly beyond 96 degrees before interfering with the basement door, and in practice I usually see it extend to 105 degrees with the tolerance (0.01" + kerf) I built into the hinge. I did this so the basement door is less likely to pinch if opened on a placemat or tablecloth (or in your hands), so it sits flush if your play surface is uneven, and so you can deliberately elevate the tower a bit if you’d rather have the dice tray slope away from the tower to collect the dice more easily. That said, I haven’t assembled this that very times or with many combinations of materials/glues/finishes, so it’s entirely possible that the design should be a bit more forgiving.

One other subtlety about the design is that the angles may not look perfectly aligned or flush: Pushed all the way in, the tray is designed to deflect exactly 0.5 degrees into the box even ignoring the bottom hinge tolerance. You’ll see this in the shape of notch and slope in the tray’s side walls, and in the notched funnel piece that sits 0.175" from the edge (as opposed to the material width, 0.125"). You’ll use this extra half-degree when opening the lid; the shape of the tines forces it beyond flush just a bit. This helps keep the top lid and tray closed even when setting down the tower horizontally, provides some nice gravity-based resistance to opening the top lid without endangering the tines, and provides a nice tactile hint that the tray can open when holding the box. The weight of the dice and tray ensure that the box should still look like a flush 3x3x6" rectangular prism when resting on a table–which was one of my design goals–but there’s a certain amount of deliberate deflection allowed there so the tray subtly locks closed.

Thanks again, and happy new year!

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I just went back and pulled up my files to refresh my memory on the changes, and I’m thinking a scaling error must have crept in on me at some point. Now I’m all confuddled – I have a v.3.0 and a v.3.1 and my finished version and am not entirely sure any more how I got to where I ended up! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: Your 3.0 version looks like my finished version, so I think the things I had to fix were actually my own goofs along the way as I adjusted for scaling issues in my software – sorry about that!!! I’ll edit my comments above accordingly. :slight_smile:

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I actually had the same problems that you did, so I think it was in the file, not something you did.

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Ah, thank you @MichaelKoske and @geek2nurse. May I ask, did you use the SVG or the AI, and which program did you open it in for design modifications? My workflow is mostly in Fusion360 and Illustrator directly into the :glowforge: web app, and I haven’t tried much with Inkscape or Affinity (or other vector tools).

Love the wood combinations.

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