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Cheap Dice Mold Mod

 A lot of people (me included) are playing with making our own dice with resin and inexpensive silicon molds. You can get a set of nearly 20 two-part molds for about $20, with the full range of polyhedral shapes plus some oddities like FUDGE dice. They're pretty good, and it definitely beats going through the molding process to make your own, both in time and material costs.

 

But they're not without problems. Notably, resin has a tendency to shrink a bit as it cures. larger "squish" molds deal with that by having a sort of built-in funnel leading into the mold which has extra resin in it. These inexpensive two-part molds, though, do not, which means that there's often a little dent or bubble in the die once it's finished curing, and cutting off the sprue is generally better than having to fill in more resin and going through another curing time.

But I've come up with a potential fix, for which the materials are relatively inexpensive and the kind of people who do this kind of thing might just have around the house anyway. In addition to the dice molds, this requires:

  • Plastic pipettes (the kind frequently used in resin work; they sometimes throw them in with the resin I order)
  • Hot glue
  • A small tube of silicone caulk

And here's what to do: 

  1. Stick the pipette through the fill hole in the top piece of the mold. You want to stick it through from the top side, so the narrow, pointy end of the pipette comes out on the the interior, numbered side of the mold top.
  2. Use the hot glue to fix the thin end of the pipette in place. The glue won't stick well to the silicone of the mold, but it'll hold OK on the pipette, so a good blob will keep it from slipping back through the hole.
  3. Squeeze a bead of caulk around the pipette on the outside of the mold top (that is, the non-number, non-hot glue side), starting at the mold and building up a tube of caulk as far up the pipette as desired. You do want to get it on the top of the mold so there's no gap for resin to flow out, but you don't want to get it on the protruding lip of the top; that'll interfere with getting it fixed in place when you assemble the mold.
  4. Give the caulk a few hours to set, then snip off the hot glue and the bottom of the pipette. The caulk should adhere to the silicone of the mold, but not to the plastic of the pipette, so once freed from the bottom, you can gently pull it out.

What you should end up with looks like this:

 

 

When you assemble the mold, it'll look like you've got a sort of chimney sticking up from the fill hole. That means you get a small resin reservoir which can be topped up with a little extra, fixing the shrinkage issue. The results I got look like this:

 

Worked out pretty well, I think. The one on the left has had the sprue snipped off leaving a spot that needs sanding but not filling. The one on the right is unaltered.


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