Tim Scott
United States
West Fargo
North Dakota
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Yet another Do-It-Yourself Dice Tower.
My wife and two youngest sons were playing Descent yesterday, and my DIY dice tower made out of scrap under-layment (think: 1/4" plywood) was getting the best of us. You are constantly rolling dice in this game -- and I never laid down any felt or rubber in my tower so it was VERY NOISY. Every drop of the dice resulted in a LOUD CLATTER -- especially since my boys just *love* to slam the dice when they throw it in the tower.
Enter today and some free time. I poked around on the Internet and found some plans for making a dice tower out of foam core:
http://www.lord-of-the-dice.de/download/tower/dicetower-inst...
Cool! I just happened to have an extra sheet of foam core. I also have a hot glue gun (thanks to my fine wife). Anyhow, I didn't quite follow the instructions to the letter. First, using a glue stick, I affixed the print-out of the tower plans to my foam core. Then I cut up the tower and the interior shelf pieces to see how they worked at a dry fit. Just fine! I did have to trim down the shelf tongues a bit though, because they stuck out of the sides and I wanted to make a nice castle-like textured overlay (more on that later).
I fired up the hot glue gun and put the two shelves on the back piece. Before the glue hardened, I dry fit one side so they would have the proper angle. After it hardened, I put glue in one side of the tower. I didn't pin anything like the instructions mentioned. I just held things manually until the glue hardened -- it doesn't take long and you have to work somewhat quickly. After that, I glued the middle shelf to the tower front and dry fit that so the angle worked. Next, I glued the front shelf and front tower to the side that was already in place.
Next, I glued on the other side -- once again working quickly before the glue had a chance to set. At this point I had the tower down. My foam core has a grid pattern on it and I used that to help to carve out the crenelations on the top of the tower.
I didn't necessarily like the pattern for the tray. I wanted something a bit higher in the back by the tower and therefore modified it accordingly - high in the back and gradually getting lower in the front. I pretty much just eyeballed things, laying the tower down on the foam core and outlining it so the tray would be form fitting. I did this for the bottom, back, and front tray edges - making the front edge two grid squares high and the back 8 grid squares high. After that, I made the sides by keeping them 8 grid squares high from back to front up to the front of the tower. Then I just cut a line from there down to 2 grid squares high in the front. I ended up having to modify this a bit as you'll see below.
Next was the fun part. I needed to "spiff" the thing up. The plans provide overlay pages, but they didn't really help me too much. I guess I could have printed a full page texture and then reprinted the overlay page on the textured page. Instead, I scouted out for some textures on-line and came across these:
http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/packs/building_church_fortress...
Free seamless church textures. Neat! In my original DIY Dice Tower search, I had come across one set of plans that had lancet windows cut into the side of the dice tower. I stole this idea with the intent of cutting out the lancet windows on the texture after I applied it to the tower. Measuring the tower and using Gimp, I scaled & created textures for the front, sides, back, and tray sections. Using a glue stick, a rolling cutter table, and exacto knife I form fitted all the textures and affixed them to the tower and tray. The lancent windows need to be aligned properly -- since I was cutting them out, I wanted to make sure they were *under* the top-most point of the interior shelf (in other words, I didn't want to have them flipped around and accidentally cut into the shelf since I would be cutting out the lancent windows.)
Anyhow, this led to an oops. My 8 grid high tray covered up the lower half of the bottom lancent windows. I modified the tray edge so it would just pass under each window. I then cut the windows out and used some black magic marker to make the ledges less noticeable. I did the same thing with the crenelations. That's as far as I decided to take it -- things looked fine to me, but other edges could potentially take some magic marker to make them less noticeable. I'm just not that picky.
Anyhoo, below is the result. Because I form fitted the tray, it fits quite snugly when down and then when put up for storage. I've uploaded the plans and included the scaled textures I used when building it. Hopefully someone may find this useful.
One potential change I would to would be to texture *everything* before assembly. That would make things look nicer, but it definitely would take more work.
Cheers,
--tim
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Tim Scott
United States
West Fargo
North Dakota
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Here's a link to the plans & textures:
Do-it-yourself Dice Tower
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Tim Scott
United States
West Fargo
North Dakota
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If anyone is interested in a dice tower, I'm willing to make foam core & textured versions (like the ones above) for
  or for trade (check my collection!)
I plan to go with complete texturing inside & out for subsequent towers. Stay tuned for photos of them.
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