Introduction: Ultra Cheap Dice Tower

By Glass Giant
About: I get a kick out of making stuff from wood, bytes, food, pixels, plastic and silicon, and occasionally metal and fabric. I aspire to be a jack of all trades. Member of Halifax Makerspace.

We needed to make 15 cheap dice towers, one for each of the gaming tables at Hal-Con 2018. It took roughly 3 hours for 2 people to laser cut and glue these up. We got 2 towers from one sheet of 20x30" foamcore at $1.50 per sheet, plus a bit of scrap white hardboard.

A video of the assembly process can be found on our YouTube channel.

Step 1: Cutting the Pieces

I used Inkscape, a free SVG graphic editing program to design and cut the dice towers. You can cut these using a laser, as I did on the Halifax Makerspace's laser cutter, or print them out on paper and use that as templates to cut them using a hobby knife. If you're using a laser, monitor it very carefully for fire! Foamcore is very flammable.

The red lines are intended to be cut all the way through 5mm black foamcore. I got mine from the dollar store. The blue lines are intended to be cut at a steep angle. Basically, you want to scoop out a little foam without cutting through. The skeleton, outlined in green, is intended to be cut from 3mm white hardboard. You could use a fret saw or scroll saw to cut this if you don't have access to a laser. Or your could use cardboard of similar thickness.

Attachments

Step 2: Assembly - Baffles

Use low temperature hot glue. Glue all 4 baffle pieces together. Hold them approximately square and plumb until the glue cools.

Step 3: Assembly - Tower Walls

Glue all 4 walls together. Hold them square until the glue cools

Step 4: Assembly - Tower Top

Glue all 5 tower top pieces together. Be sure the holes outlined in blue are at the bottom.

Step 5: Putting It All Together

Glue the baffle assembly onto the base, in the slots provided, ensuring the lower baffle slopes down towards the front of the base. Ensure the side of the base with the blue outline faces up. Glue the tower wall assembly into the cut-out slot outlined in blue. Glue the tower top assembly onto the tower wall assembly, ensuring the long slot lines up with the long tab. Glue the rocks to the base (these can go on either side, in any orientation). Glue skeleton to the base.

Pull off any loose strings of hot glue, and you're done!