Fold-out dice box (and dice tower)

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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I re-downloaded your original (I used the SVG) and checked the spacing on the parts I had trouble with, and your pattern looks perfect. I think when I did my scaling something must have gotten screwed up. I go back and forth between Affinity Designer and Inkscape, and remembering which key to hold down for “proportional” has bitten me before!

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I use mostly Corel and then send everything through Inkscape before it goes to the :glowforge:. Most of the time it works perfect, I guess something just went wonky this time, because I also had tabs spaced a little too far apart. Thankfully they were close enough, that with just a little trimming, I could make it work.
Thanks again for the great design!

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I’m mostly Corel myself. But I go direct from there to SVG (Save As) and to the GF. I don’t run it through Inkscape. Why are you doing the extra step?

Corel seems to have an issue sometimes with not processing cutouts.

That’s the winding rule issue. The Glowforge doesn’t really handle all of the SVG spec and that’s the one that bites you. You can see in the preview that it won’t do what you want so you don’t have to waste material. You can reverse the path direction or just turn that part of your design into a bitmap and it’ll work fine.

Since I only get the issue once in a long while (months) because it often works as designed it’s not worth to me to go through the extra step of running through Inkscape for the 1% of the time I encounter the issue.

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Yeah, I don’t get the issue all of the time either, but I just got myself into the habit once I found out about it, so now it just takes me a few seconds to save it in Inkscape, then pull it into the GlowForge.

I love this design! I’ve made 5 of them so far, with 2 more planned.

My husband, Greg, and I host our D&D group at our house. Greg is our DM and we’ve got 5 players. I’ve made each of us players a dice tower. Greg is still choosing graphics for his. My niece wants a unicorn tower, which we’ll be making later today.

All towers were made with draftboard, 1/8. The only hiccup I’ve noticed is that if a d20 is rolled close to the edge, it sometimes gets stuck on the lid arm, otherwise I’ve seen no problem with this tower. Everyone loved them when I gave them as gifts last night. [Edit to add: I used the SVG in Inkscape, then straight to Glowforge.]

The forum will only let met post 3 images as a new user… I’ve got 24 images… You can view the side art for each tower here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/ALhFXWfy4kTp55zn6

Here’s the front of all 5 together (the top has our group logo):

The first tower is for our gnome rogue (we left the mask on the moon because we love the effect).

The second tower is for our mountain dwarf barbarian.

The third tower is for our halfling sorcerer (I did two passes on the side panel images – I LOVE how these images turned out).

The fourth tower is for our half-elf druid – her arcane focus is a jackalope skull (we also left the mask on this tower for the skull because we liked the effect).

And the fifth is my tower, wood elf ranger (half-sister to the druid above, so we have the same forest imagery on our side panels!).

Each tower has the same inside art (the text says “Roll for initiative!”):

And here’s a shot of our table last night while the towers were out!

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I love how it looks like Vader has Micky Mouse ears.

Very cool. Nice job on this and thanks for the share!!!

This was awesome. Thank you!

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Not nearly as cool as some of the ones shown above, but here’s my Cthulhu-themed version…

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Thanks, I love this. I think I will make several and make them game specific! The first game I have in mind would be for “Bang! Dice”. I will change the art to more of a western theme!

Thanks again!

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Hello everyone, New Glowforge owner here. We’ve had it about 3 weeks, been making some tiles, coasters and laser engraving some of my cutting boards and other wood work that i do. I went to make this dice tower as my kids love table top games and when i made it, these several pieces don’t line up. I used the V3 that the OP was gracious enough to share, it was on the same material (the boards they send us, and everything. What did I do wrong? Please see attached pics, its like the two boards are about 1/8" off.

Hello James! Sorry to hear that the file gave you trouble. That’s certainly the right piece in the right alignment, and with official Proofgrade material you should have exactly 0.125" board as opposed to 3mm board available elsewhere.

Those two pieces you pictured should be exactly the same width including the tabs (3 inches), and the tall piece should be exactly 6 inches; can you confirm those measurements? The interior piece pictured should be 3.091 inches tall, for what it’s worth.

It’s a bit hard to tell from your image, but if I had to hazard a guess I’d say one of the two pieces got stretched/shrunk in the Glowforge web app, particularly if you had to move them around to fit an existing piece of material. It’s quite easy to accidentally drag a grab handle and make a trivial-looking change that would result in the kind of misalignment you see. If you’ve made any edits to the file, I can also inspect it with my software (Illustrator) and check if the sizes make sense.

Hope we can get this resolved so you and your kids can enjoy!

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Jeff,

Thanks so much for the response. I believe it might have been resized and I should have added more details about our issue in the original question. So when I loaded the file, and put in a brand new whole piece of PG material, it did not print the archer, the lady or the wolf, all the other pieces it did. My wife and I researched it and apparently those pieces were just touching the line of the field of view, which the laser won’t cut so they were greyed out. So after some fiddling we put in the same bit of material that was left over, deleted the other ones that already printed and moved the other parts so they were in the FOV. I likely just resized them. I should measure and print the other sides again, thanks!

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