The Dice Tower is dimensioned parametrically. Using the text document, I can instantly change the parameters of the dice tower with an edit and save.
Mahjong Dice Tower
Made of 1/8” Cast Acrylic, I made a Mahjong-Themed Dice Tower for the game of Mahjong! It’s 9 inches long and 7.5 inches tall, it was parametrically designed in SolidWorks (every single dimension is changeable with an edit of a word document), it’s laser cut and handed painted by yours truly.
The red and green characters are two tiles in the grade of Mahjong - the Red Dragon and the Green Dragon respectively. When combined with a third, White Dragon, the 3 dragons make up some of the most powerful hands in the game, and they look pretty on the tower!
The back of the dice tower sports a drawer! Perfect for holding up to 5 dice, the drawer fits snugly into the back wall of the tower itself. The back wall of the drawer is just taller than the back wall of the tower, so it’s got the added bonus of not being able to come out! When pushed in fully, the drawer fits in flush with the rest of the wall.
The Design of the Tower
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Cross Section
A cross section of the tower reveals how the dice fall and how the drawer fits flush with the wall.
A lot of obstacles were overcome in the making of the tower. The tower taught me how to take kerf into account; the width of the laser was non-zero and 1/8” acrylic meant that tight fits needed to be measured precisely: too loose and the tower wouldn’t hold, but too tight and the tower would crack (a lottt of prototype parts cracked as I was trying to find the correct kerf). An overlap needs to be added for all the male connectors too in order for the press interference to fit - this measurement came down to thousandths of an inch of precision. Parametrically fitting the drawer was also quite a challenge, but it’s nothing some old fashion trigonometry can’t solve. You can see in the model that the drawer opening has a bit of a lip so your finger can have something to hold onto - something the image couldn’t capture.
Laser Cutting
A video of the laser cutting happening! You can see some of the places where the laser has engraved and is about to cut.