I have an isometric 3D view of the wooden core of the tower, but it's pretty hard to read if you are not used to this kind of drawing (or if you're not the one who has drew it )
If I manage to put may hands on the paper (yes, it's a paper version, lost somewhere on my desk), I'll scan it and post it somewhere. For now, you can try to take a look at the photograph I took some time ago from the drawing, but the quality is pretty bad
The important part is to get a length of wood with a square section, and then saw some of the bits off at 45°. The hard part is to ensure that the section really is square so that the assembly still has a square section. If this is not the case (mine had two 89° angles and two 91° angles, but I noticed it only after sawing), your are going to face a couple of hours of intensive sanding (been there, done that ) I used simple wood glue for assembling the pieces; this glue is quite forgiving when the surfaces are not perfectly flat, provided that you let it dry long enough.
The height of the core is equal to three times the side of its section (30 cm high, 10 x 10 cm section in my case), you can conceptually see it as three 10 x 10 x 10 cm cubes stacked on top of each other. In other words, if you have a 5 x 5 cm timber, the length of wood you need is 5 x 6 x 4 = 120 cm (plus a little more, because the saw always takes one or two millimeters off). In US units, this would be something like 2" x 2" timber, 4' long. But you can use basically any size you want. Originally the plan was made for a 6 x 6 cm section, but I found only 5 x 5 cm timber, so I re-calculated all the dimensions just before sawing. The reason for these dimensions was to have cavities which are always larger than the widest dimension of my largest dice (the ones I got with Catan Card Game). 5 x 5 cm is enough for that.
The sides are made of 4mm thick polycarbonate (about 5/32") cut with a jigsaw. The screws are simple wood screws (3.5 x 16 mm, I've no idea what would be the equivalent US size, but anything not too big should do the trick).
Finally,the slopes are covered with the rubber from the back side of an old (and pretty ugly) mouse pad, glued with contact glue. It prevents the dice from sliding and forces them to roll, thus adding to the randomness of the result.
Beautiful! We liked it so much, my husband made one and added sound activated lights that flash as the dice go down it...i've also uploaded my pics...here's one of them...
Beautiful! We liked it so much, my husband made one and added sound activated lights that flash as the dice go down it...i've also uploaded my pics...here's one of them...
My pleasure! I'm very happy that someone else has tried (and succeeded ) to build one based on this design. How did your husband build it? Did he use my 3D drawing, or did he try to redraw it himself before building it? And now that it's made, does he think that it was easier to build it by stacking planks (at least it looks this way from the pictures) rather than by using timber as I did?
"No matter where you are in life or what you have on your plate, never lose sight of the importance of play in your daily life." - Matt Robertson, BGG user: Bixby
"Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court
I've decided that this is the dice tower I'm going to build!
If anyone is still interested, I made proper 2D drawings of the tower's core. The PDF is available at http://users.jyu.fi/~mweber/dice_tower/dice_tower_blueprints.... I hope the drawings are correct... The lengths are given for a 12x12 cm core, but you can easily scale them to any size you want.
Posted Mon Nov 12, 2007 12:35 pm
)
