For the first time in a while, my entire weekend was free. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really go anywhere so I decided to break out a project that has been on the backburner for the past couple of weeks: a custom d20 dice tower.
Earlier this month, I took the kids to their first Comic Con (locally) and found this booth selling interesting laser-cut items. SanaLoma Laser is a small business in Texas cutting custom items for fun and display. While there were a few fun things at the booth, the large d20 caught my eye and I picked it up before we left the ‘Con.
The kit is pretty nice in that it has thorough instructions with pictures, glue, and even sandpaper all included. You really don’t need anything else except maybe a damp cloth/paper towel to wipe all the normal laser cutting dust off everything. I warning though, I broke the first number I cleaned (the “18” in the pic above) because I was a little too aggressive on the cleaning and ripped out the fragile center of the “8.”
I built up most everything in large stages and then primed the pieces before the major assemblies would make it almost impossible to get at. Knowing dicetowers from past builds, they can generate quite a racket so I added some felt to the ramps to help quiet the noise down.
After everything was primed, I took the numbers and painted them with Turbodork’s Icing Death to give it an interesting blue. Since the numbers were cut out from the upper overlay, it was easy to throw a contrasting color underneath to help the numbers pop.
Getting the inner tower into the small opening was both awkward and inspiring when thinking of the engineering that went into crafting this piece.
The assembled d20 then just sits into the dice corral so you can choose whether to use it or let your wild dice roam free. It took a few hours of prep on Saturday and half a day on Sunday to complete it. All-in-all, it was a fun build and I really like the way it came.