Charlie's Dice tower

Dice Tower Overview

Here’s the result of our first design project––my dice tower! The eight inch tall tower is made of laser-cut quarter inch thick medium density fiberboard (MDF). The MDF pieces are held together by press-fits thanks to five thousandths of an inch overlap on the male ends of the laser-cut pieces. The tower has a backgammon theme as seen in the labeled shelf for the doubling die and the backgammon board pattern etched onto the front plate.

Through this design project, I gained valuable laser-cutter experience, grew comfortable with parametric modeling on SolidWorks, and learned the concept of kerf, which applies to numerous manufacturing methods.

Dice Tower Summary & Design Process

The constraints of this project did not allow for the use of non laser-cut pieces; however, I still wanted to incorporate a rotating piece in the tower. So, I designed a hole in the front and back plates with a diameter of the same length as the diagonal of a square extrusion protruding from two sides of a spinning trapdoor piece. I then sanded the edges for a smoother spin. 

The final product varies pretty significantly from my initial design, though. First, I chose to enlarge the backboard in order to provide a more fun experience, enabling the user to toss the dice into the tower off of the backboard from a significant distance away. Second, I chose to remove the side and rear walls of the landing area, which were both unnecessary to keep the dice in place and obstructive when collecting the dice after a roll. 

If I had unlimited time and unlimited access to materials, I would like to recreate this tower with additional spinning doors on the horizontal axis and perhaps manufacture it out of CNC milled aluminum and requisite hardware to increase durability.