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My Dice This Time

 I've been working with making dice out of epoxy, which is fun, but I've been fascinated by custom dice designs and making your own molds. Fortunately, the internet is a fountain of information about it, and I'm fortunate to have had most of the pieces kicking around already. Design your dice in the software of your choice (used to that; dice are easy to build), 3d-print (doing that for years), and make molds by pouring some kind of rubber around them. While I went a somewhat different direction, this video from Dice Witchery was particularly useful for me. The main problem I faced was that I absolutely could not get platinum-cure silicone rubbers to cure no matter what I tried, so I ultimately used a polyurethane rubber, and I've got a tin-cure silicone rubber on deck for further mold-making.

But this isn't really about technique yet. This is just proof of concept. Can I, in fact, make reusable molds in order to make my own dice designs in resin? Signs point to yes. All of them d6 for obvious GURPS-related reasons, of course. First up, a beveled-corner die with a wombat motif for the 6:

I've been a Star Trek fan since the original series, and it struck me that the command, science, and engineering badges would be good for dice. I think I was right. Time to dig out GURPS Prime Directive?

Finally, having done the TOS dice, I decided to make what I'm calling the d6s9. That's a Terok Nor silhouette in the 6 position and Cardassian numbers on the other sides. Unfortunately, I can't read Cardassian, so I can't use the die.

There are a number of small improvements I could make to the originals and a second generation of molds, and all of these are unsanded, but I think this was a really good first attempt.


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