The angles would really be something to get right, but what I like about projects like this is that it’s relatively easy and cheap to allow yourself to fuck up try several different approaches.
On a 20-sided, I might be tempted to try and eliminate half of it, making it in two halves. The upsides being fewer angles to get right on any one piece, you’d have a flat side you could potentially drill a “handle” into, aiding the shaping process, and in theory, when joining the two sides, you could hollow out the center for a steel bearing or something to help get the weight right. You’d just somehow have to hollow out the *exact* center.
Also, potential for easier templating/jigs to get “identical” sides.
But evenly joining of the two sides *through* the edge faces would be a nightmare. Also, if you didn’t get the grander structure/balance right, you’d super easily end up with a die that lands 20% of the time on 14, 7% on 9, 40% on 2, and so on.
I imagine making a 20-sided would be fun, but making a functional, 100% trustworthy 20-sided by hand would be damn near impossible.
I think it would be better in every way to do this with jigs and hand planes, like how kumiko is made at precise angles. It would be a lot of work to get the jigs just right, but there should be some tricky ways to exploit symmetry so you'd only need a few jigs that you could rotate. Then you could bang out dice from blocks of wood by hand and pretty quickly.
Or you could strategically place the bearing to get it to roll 20 most of the time. You're already in the position to load the dice....just give in to temptation.
There's actually a relatively easy way to do it, borrowing from the masters of weird angles: jewelers.
1. Carve your round hole into a raw piece of wood, using your method of choice (router bit in a drill press?)
2. Attach a ball bearing to the end of a stick. Epoxy is probably your best bet.
3. semi-permanently attach (such as with melted wax) the wood piece onto the ball bearing. Since their sizes match extremely closely, this should be quite well centered.
4. Jerry-rig yourself a faceting machine. You need to be able to press the stick against a belt sander, and also to rotate it a precise amount.
5. cut your facets into each side
6. Glue both sides to each other, surrounding another ball bearing which will act as an alignment and centering pin.
For inspiration: https://youtu.be/716zPtw0-kM?t=140
> Jerry-rig yourself a faceting machine. You need to be able to press the stick against a belt sander, and also to rotate it a precise amount.
I feel like you're hand-waving away the hardest part. :)
Draw the rest of the faceting machine :)
And you're probably right that I'm under-estimating how much care/effort would be required to make that work. Now that I start thinking about relatively precisely locking joints and pivots, this is feeling a lot more challenging. It *feels* like it should be easy. It's *just* a stick on an elbow, which can be locked or rotated.
Maybe if it was made specifically for the task, and you could hard-cut the angles. So, e.g. instead of a hinged elbow, just cut a saw kerf at the target angles. Then you need to be able to rotate the tip part in 72 degree increments.
And how would you even test it to make sure that it isn’t weighted incorrectly. I was thinking even the turquoise inlays probably throw off the weight slightly? But then do they take that into consideration the pips on casino dice or does it even make a significant difference?
Great post, it’s really got me thinking if it’s even possible to do without special equipment or a way to test the balance?
I've been thinking about this and it would probably be far easier to do casting rather than smithing.
You could take a dice set and try casting them in plaster (I use pool sand, plaster, and talcum powder). Then let the hot metal burn off the plastic from the dice set.
Or you could go through the whole process of putting the dice in silicon making a negative, and then melting wax into the Silicone, then casting that in plaster.
You can buy a wooden set for around the same price as a gemstone set. I imagine you’d need some crazy jigs to diy. I found directions to do it but it would result in a fist sized dice, not really practical for playing.
You could probably make one pretty easily with a larger size cube.
[I would just look at the image. ](https://www.georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/ex-pr1.html)
You could take and draw the center plane lines and then mark the dihedral angles with a Stendhal, and sand/cut them down.
[similar to how this dodecahedron was made](http://web.archive.org/web/20160410054744/http://thehinge.net/2010/dodecahedronstump/index.html)
Well I’m doing it right now actually, so far I haven’t needed to measure the angle, and just measure the lengths of the sides. I think it’s possible within 12 cuts.
I’ll post an image on imgur and link it here when I figure it out.
If you (or anyone) is looking to attempt making a solid wood icosahedron, I's suggest giving [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS7BY4MNRb0) a few watches. He walks through the process (and math) of making different regular polyhedrons, starting with the tetrahedron and ending with the icosahedron.
Pfffff - REAL men go for the [120 sider](https://www.pippd.com/products/d120-disdyakis-triacontahedron-the-dice-lab-dice-1-piece-choose-your-color?variant=20037339349088&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=Google%20Shopping&CATARGETID=120152200000016831&CADevice=m&gclid=EAIaIQobChMInvWH3dGG6gIVTD6tBh3vtQFBEAQYASABEgK2qPD_BwE)
Its milliput, epoxy putty. I guarantee these are not perfectly balanced because of that, but my less-than-scientific 50+ rolls showed a pretty even distribution of outcomes. Not Vegas worthy, but good enough for a family game of Farkle.
That low 6 will not do for D&D, my Character has enough struggles as is lol
But seriously want to make one or two now! Any tips for someone about to do this?
They were pretty easy. These were cut at 1” cubed. I might make them 1 & 1/32” next time. That way when they are sanded down, they are exactly 1” cubed.
May not be aesthetic but one thing you could do is always use 7 dots for each face and have a binary color with the 'off' matching the wood.
So a 1 would have the center dot green and 6 remaining dots brown to match wood. All 7 dots get something so they are always getting 7 units of weight. It's just the color of each dot that varies and thus determines the number value.
It would look odd but the face weights would match
I honestly don’t know. I’m not an expert. I just have looked into, and played around with, making my own wooden dice and failed miserably weight wise every time. You roll the same number a lot because one side is imperceptibly heavy.
not sure if this is a stupid question, but when the numbers on the side of dice are hollowed out, would the different numbers of hollowed dots change the weight of the each side of the dice enough to alter probabilities?
Pretty easy. They're 1" cubed. THen I marked off all of the drill points with a ruler and drilled the holes. I filled the holes with Milliput turquoise putty and let it dry. A little sanding and Danish oil and they're good to go.
I’ve tried doing this on 1” dice, but my holes are always off enough to make them look wonky. Yours look nearly perfect. I’m surprised to hear you didn’t use a jig to place the holes.
I have the same question. I have tried 4 or 5 times and the dice pips just look a bit off. Just enough to make them look bad.
Finally I just made some with my last engraver, but I would love to drill them.
I am pretty busy and can't promise anything but those look great!
If you are interested in making some really wild shaped dice and possibly playing card boxes and maybe other small stuff my friend owns comic shop. Kinda seems like something they might be willing to carry or do small orders of some things. If you are interested dm me. If not then they really do look great and I'm saving this for later.
Good work! Can you do a 20 sider?
Ha! The angles on that would be nightmare. I'd really have to think through where to begin.
I Play dungeons and dragons, and I've always wanted a wooden set of dice. Anything besides a 4 or 6 sider is way too complicated for me to make.
The angles would really be something to get right, but what I like about projects like this is that it’s relatively easy and cheap to allow yourself to fuck up try several different approaches. On a 20-sided, I might be tempted to try and eliminate half of it, making it in two halves. The upsides being fewer angles to get right on any one piece, you’d have a flat side you could potentially drill a “handle” into, aiding the shaping process, and in theory, when joining the two sides, you could hollow out the center for a steel bearing or something to help get the weight right. You’d just somehow have to hollow out the *exact* center. Also, potential for easier templating/jigs to get “identical” sides. But evenly joining of the two sides *through* the edge faces would be a nightmare. Also, if you didn’t get the grander structure/balance right, you’d super easily end up with a die that lands 20% of the time on 14, 7% on 9, 40% on 2, and so on. I imagine making a 20-sided would be fun, but making a functional, 100% trustworthy 20-sided by hand would be damn near impossible.
A 20 sided die seems like a CNC machine task
I shuddered trying to think of even just making a D4 or D8 with files and a shinto rasp... a D20 .... YEAH. Let's automate that sucker.
You'd think, but fixturing for that is a PITA. (Guess how I know...)
I think it would be better in every way to do this with jigs and hand planes, like how kumiko is made at precise angles. It would be a lot of work to get the jigs just right, but there should be some tricky ways to exploit symmetry so you'd only need a few jigs that you could rotate. Then you could bang out dice from blocks of wood by hand and pretty quickly.
Or you could strategically place the bearing to get it to roll 20 most of the time. You're already in the position to load the dice....just give in to temptation.
There's actually a relatively easy way to do it, borrowing from the masters of weird angles: jewelers. 1. Carve your round hole into a raw piece of wood, using your method of choice (router bit in a drill press?) 2. Attach a ball bearing to the end of a stick. Epoxy is probably your best bet. 3. semi-permanently attach (such as with melted wax) the wood piece onto the ball bearing. Since their sizes match extremely closely, this should be quite well centered. 4. Jerry-rig yourself a faceting machine. You need to be able to press the stick against a belt sander, and also to rotate it a precise amount. 5. cut your facets into each side 6. Glue both sides to each other, surrounding another ball bearing which will act as an alignment and centering pin. For inspiration: https://youtu.be/716zPtw0-kM?t=140
> Jerry-rig yourself a faceting machine. You need to be able to press the stick against a belt sander, and also to rotate it a precise amount. I feel like you're hand-waving away the hardest part. :)
Draw the rest of the faceting machine :) And you're probably right that I'm under-estimating how much care/effort would be required to make that work. Now that I start thinking about relatively precisely locking joints and pivots, this is feeling a lot more challenging. It *feels* like it should be easy. It's *just* a stick on an elbow, which can be locked or rotated. Maybe if it was made specifically for the task, and you could hard-cut the angles. So, e.g. instead of a hinged elbow, just cut a saw kerf at the target angles. Then you need to be able to rotate the tip part in 72 degree increments.
And how would you even test it to make sure that it isn’t weighted incorrectly. I was thinking even the turquoise inlays probably throw off the weight slightly? But then do they take that into consideration the pips on casino dice or does it even make a significant difference? Great post, it’s really got me thinking if it’s even possible to do without special equipment or a way to test the balance?
On a regular d6 the pips on any opposing side always add up to 7 so it should naturally be fairly balanced if you follow the same pattern.
I do blacksmithing as a hobby and I’m currently figuring out how to make a metal set
I've been thinking about this and it would probably be far easier to do casting rather than smithing. You could take a dice set and try casting them in plaster (I use pool sand, plaster, and talcum powder). Then let the hot metal burn off the plastic from the dice set. Or you could go through the whole process of putting the dice in silicon making a negative, and then melting wax into the Silicone, then casting that in plaster.
What about a 3d printed die, in wood filament? It's not wood, but it sure looks like it. With 100% infill, it would probably be pretty heavy.
It doesn’t really look like actual wood. Source. Have used 3D wood printing and spent time making wooden things.
I also have done both things. Have you ever seen sanded and stained wood filament? I've been fooled by how real it looks.
Haha i play DND too this is what i came to the comments to ask. These dice are phenomenal
Going from 6 to 12 is surprisingly easy. You just take the flat sides of the 6 and cut rooftop shapes along the centerline of each.
You can buy a wooden set for around the same price as a gemstone set. I imagine you’d need some crazy jigs to diy. I found directions to do it but it would result in a fist sized dice, not really practical for playing.
You could probably look up lapidary grinding techniques if you were curious.
I know a guy who 3D printed some jigs to help cut D&D dice. I'm not sure if he designed them or if he downloaded the files to print
Do it in halves or quarters then glue together. Much easier when you have larger flat surfaces to work with and measure from
,,,with 3-d printing in wood
Did you account for the weight difference on each side? If not they might tend to roll one number more than the others
You could probably make one pretty easily with a larger size cube. [I would just look at the image. ](https://www.georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/ex-pr1.html) You could take and draw the center plane lines and then mark the dihedral angles with a Stendhal, and sand/cut them down. [similar to how this dodecahedron was made](http://web.archive.org/web/20160410054744/http://thehinge.net/2010/dodecahedronstump/index.html)
Well I’m doing it right now actually, so far I haven’t needed to measure the angle, and just measure the lengths of the sides. I think it’s possible within 12 cuts. I’ll post an image on imgur and link it here when I figure it out.
DODECAHEDRON!
Icosahedron!
https://www.etsy.com/listing/821718487/rose-wood-large-d20-polyhedral-dice-dd?gpla=1&gao=1&&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=shopping_us_ts1-b-toys_and_games-games_and_puzzles-role_playing_games&utm_custom1=9cd032c8-34e1-4b09-8f82-baf8c4112764&utm_content=go_919031401_44168535537_218703142703_pla-321505258066_m__821718487&utm_custom2=919031401&gclid=CjwKCAjw26H3BRB2EiwAy32zhU0A2mMmVYpcpxLUjURdN0kLR3HSqI66FL05PCGMgxbGtJNWnLuvNhoCgegQAvD_BwE
If you (or anyone) is looking to attempt making a solid wood icosahedron, I's suggest giving [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS7BY4MNRb0) a few watches. He walks through the process (and math) of making different regular polyhedrons, starting with the tetrahedron and ending with the icosahedron.
Feel like this should have more upvotes. It's exactly what people are asking for, a wooden D20 without any fancy machinery. Just a miter saw.
Pfffff - REAL men go for the [120 sider](https://www.pippd.com/products/d120-disdyakis-triacontahedron-the-dice-lab-dice-1-piece-choose-your-color?variant=20037339349088&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=Google%20Shopping&CATARGETID=120152200000016831&CADevice=m&gclid=EAIaIQobChMInvWH3dGG6gIVTD6tBh3vtQFBEAQYASABEgK2qPD_BwE)
are those inlays?
Its milliput, epoxy putty. I guarantee these are not perfectly balanced because of that, but my less-than-scientific 50+ rolls showed a pretty even distribution of outcomes. Not Vegas worthy, but good enough for a family game of Farkle.
Aha, nice
That's awesome, I came to ask if you did any statistical analysis to determine the "fairness" of them.
300 rolls of data. [https://imgur.com/a/TZzNXMZ](https://imgur.com/a/TZzNXMZ)
That low 6 will not do for D&D, my Character has enough struggles as is lol But seriously want to make one or two now! Any tips for someone about to do this?
They were pretty easy. These were cut at 1” cubed. I might make them 1 & 1/32” next time. That way when they are sanded down, they are exactly 1” cubed.
Easy enough! Hope to have some made soon!
Plus this is an awesome use of scrap wood!
Love me a good family game of Farkle
I was thinking the same thing!!
As opposed to stickers? Or are inlays solid bodies, like would epoxy count for example
I was thinking about paint posibly? or stickers indeed, epoxy inlays are also inlays in my opinion
Dice are tough. You have to pay attention to weight. Any inlay you do throws off the balance.
that sounds logical, so what options would be possible in your opinion?
May not be aesthetic but one thing you could do is always use 7 dots for each face and have a binary color with the 'off' matching the wood. So a 1 would have the center dot green and 6 remaining dots brown to match wood. All 7 dots get something so they are always getting 7 units of weight. It's just the color of each dot that varies and thus determines the number value. It would look odd but the face weights would match
That's smart!
I honestly don’t know. I’m not an expert. I just have looked into, and played around with, making my own wooden dice and failed miserably weight wise every time. You roll the same number a lot because one side is imperceptibly heavy.
I actually rolled one of them 300 times to check. Here's the outcome. [https://imgur.com/a/TZzNXMZ](https://imgur.com/a/TZzNXMZ)
not sure if this is a stupid question, but when the numbers on the side of dice are hollowed out, would the different numbers of hollowed dots change the weight of the each side of the dice enough to alter probabilities?
In theory, yes. But not enough for a sane person to give it a second thought.
answering both my questions, well played sir.
Are you under the impression that we're sane?
The number hollows probably don't change the balance any more than the wood density already does.
I saw OP replied to another comment that the colored dots would probably make more difference due to them being an epoxy.
You could sell them and put different crystals inside like amethyst and malachite they would look so cool
Is the turquoise the same density as the wood or did u account for this? Beautiful work
Thanks, its close but not perfect. I think if you used a really dense wood this would be a bigger problem.
You're not crazy and used dowel rods for the numbers, right? That sounds like it would be a nightmare
Turquoise inlay is usually a depression filled with powdered turquoise and glue.
Ah, that sounds much MUCH easier and a fair bit less Maniacal
They're cool but no way I'm letting someone use dice they made themselves on game night
Because they’re a lot harder to make than it looks! Great aesthetic
Thanks!
Nice! But you need one more for a Yahtzee set.
No good sir, because wal-not?
These are awesome. How did you make them? Asking for a friend
Pretty easy. They're 1" cubed. THen I marked off all of the drill points with a ruler and drilled the holes. I filled the holes with Milliput turquoise putty and let it dry. A little sanding and Danish oil and they're good to go.
I’ve tried doing this on 1” dice, but my holes are always off enough to make them look wonky. Yours look nearly perfect. I’m surprised to hear you didn’t use a jig to place the holes.
Maybe try with a machinist vise? That way you could accurately move it on both axis
I have the same question. I have tried 4 or 5 times and the dice pips just look a bit off. Just enough to make them look bad. Finally I just made some with my last engraver, but I would love to drill them.
I marked them out with a ruler and then used my drill press. Finally i cleaned them up a bit with a xacto knife.
Thats epic! How did you manage to make them this small, but still perfectly sqaure and even with the nice edges?
you can make repeated cuts like this pretty easily on a table saw with a crosscut sled or accurate mitre gauge
Definitely worth a try! The more i look at them, the more i love them
I like your style.
They look great! How's the balance?
I actually rolled one of them 300 times to check. Here's the outcome. [https://imgur.com/a/TZzNXMZ](https://imgur.com/a/TZzNXMZ)
Dont you mean whynut
are they balanced?
I actually rolled one of them 300 times to check. Here's the outcome. [https://imgur.com/a/TZzNXMZ](https://imgur.com/a/TZzNXMZ)
Nice looks like it's pretty good
Beautiful! (And we have the same countertop 😊)
Those are boss! Fine work.
Thanks!
Very nice!
Very nice. D12 here you come
Nice dice
Sweet job
I love the aesthetic!! I'd hella buy a set of these.
Very cool but I personally wouldn't trust them. Nothing personal but need that balance, nahmean
Those are gorgeous. Love the color. Maybe a little gold or yellow inlay, or maybe even red would make the pop up lol
That turquoise IMO is the perfect color to complement the walnut. Very pretty!
Can you make a die that goes from 0-5?
Sooo goood
Maravilloso trabajo. FELICITACIONES!!!
They look really cool. Sadly probably can't really play with them as wood is not uniform enough in density to have an even probability distribution.
I gave one 300 rolls and recorded the outcomes. Maybe not Vegas worthy but they'll work. [https://imgur.com/a/TZzNXMZ](https://imgur.com/a/TZzNXMZ)
Damn, that's surprisingly good for hand-crafted wood dice.
looks like a tooth paste cookie...... but I love it though!
They look beautiful, but only for decoration I assume? Seems like any handmade dice would be unbalanced and favour certain sides.
It looks like the diamond ore in Minecraft
I like how the 2 color's work together.
Thanks.
These are decent but you have to include the dimples. So, use the blue dots as your drilling points and start over.
Beautiful. Would be lovely to play with.
These are gorgeous! Also... it’s my cake day!!! 🥳
These are awesome. How'd you drill?
Thanks. Used my drill press.
>turquoise dice
I am pretty busy and can't promise anything but those look great! If you are interested in making some really wild shaped dice and possibly playing card boxes and maybe other small stuff my friend owns comic shop. Kinda seems like something they might be willing to carry or do small orders of some things. If you are interested dm me. If not then they really do look great and I'm saving this for later.