Birthday Dice Box - Leopardwood
So, at the beginning of the year I decided to make a new dice box for everyone in my Friday night Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I used my own one that I had bought from Wyrmwood a number of years ago as a basis, but I realized very quickly that mine would have to be a little different, mostly because of the tools I have on hand. Theirs are very nice, but also very obviously done on a CNC machine of some sort.
This is actually the fourth such box I've made. But the first that I've written about. All of them are buried in my Instagram, but you can see that I made a basic prototype out of some scrap pine, and refined it from there. I even designed a jig for routing out the the center, and had a friend 3D print it for me.
This is the second version of the jig and it works way better than the first, which I don't have any pictures of. Now I can cut to the final dimensions and add it to the jig to just with a router set up with a bowl bit and a bearing.
It works double duty, as the two holes for screwing it into the block also act as the markers for where to drill the recesses for the magnets that keep it closed.
One thing I had done with these is I decided to make each box unique to the person it was for. So for this friend I ordered a piece of Leopardwood from Bell Forest Products (not a sponsor), and I noticed while I was cutting it, that where there was a little extra friction from the table saw blade, that it darkened the spots a little more. I put that little nugget of knowledge away for a bit while I finished doing all the cutting and routing. I ended grabbing my culinary torch out and just hitting some of it enough to really get the texture to pop, and with some sanding got the color I was looking for before lacquer and shellac.
I always include a set of dice with it that I think both go well with the box and with the personality of my friends. In this case some blue and purple ones.