Project: Operation Dice Box!

Hi folks!  It's not easy coming coming up with content, especially when I don't have my own website...well not yet at least.  Either way, while I am playing around with a new Martial Artist character class for D&D 5th Edition, less mystic capabilities and more actual martial artist.

The box!

Well I've also been working on a dice box.  I happened, while I was working, to come across a fancy jewelry box.  Nice red felt, latches and hinges already in place.  No outside work needed on my part to spruce it up!

This was a case that was large enough to hold an array of matching  jewelry like a necklace, bracelets, earrings and maybe a few other odds and ends of a matching set.  Now with the raised parts of the inner sections of the box, I couldn't just open, adjust and reuse with little fuss.  No this was going to be a total gut job.

The box before it was gutted.

So the first order of business was to rip out the top portion and its stuffing.  A little use of the exacto knife was needed, but the work got done with only a mess of padding and the cloth.  The only issue after all this was out was that some of the padding had been glued in place...ugh.

The next half was all about ripping out the bottom half.  Now I did look this over to see if I could use it, salvage it, but once I got that out I learned that the nature of the raise portion would make that impossible.

Its all out, now to clean up the glue!

Oh well then, its gotta go. No use trying to make something work that likely won't.  Plus I can now deck out the interior how I want.

Now the gluing done in the box wasn't great.  It was like who ever made the box decided to just add glue to a few spots and to do so in specific large globs that needed to be sanded down.

So with much sanding, thanks to the handy sanding block I've had for some time, I managed to get the globs of glue sanded down enough that I was happy with them.

Next up would be measuring and making a template of sorts for the interior.  Now I have some large flashcards laying around and it's easy enough to use these to fill in the spaces of the box, add some tape, measure out the sides...and learn a bit about who ever made the box.

Ugh, measure 2x, cut once, box maker failed.

You see when you make a box out of wood there is 1 important job you need to do.  Measure the fricking wood your using for the walls!  Well who ever built this thing used what felt like scrap bits of wood, and didn't take the time to make sure that all the parts were measured up when they are were building it!  Sure it all closes up nicely, but when you cut pieces of paper very precisely, put them in place and see that parts of the paper stand above some parts of the wall, well clearly precision wasn't what the box maker was going for.  So I had to shave down parts to go for a decent fit.

Well with my template made, and it fitting the both sides of I got some felt, some glue to use, and set about my next leg of work.

All together and working.

Once I had the felt cut I placed in the box to see how it fit initially.  Well it needed a bit of trimming, this of course owing to the fact that felt is thicker than the paper I was using and in turn sat differently.  But the adjustments were minor and I cut out the top and bottom for the box.  I added the glue to the bottom of the box and put the felt in, adjusting it as needed.  Then I glued the sides.  I gave this a day to set before I started to glue the felt to the top half in the same method.  Once the felt was in place I cut a few bits here and there to glue in place to deal with a few gaps in the corners.

Well the only thing that it needs are arms to help hold the lid open.  Well I have those...but just lack the time to get them both in.  I have one lid arm in place, but on its own its too loose and the lid still slams shut.  Also there is a small problem with screws.  This needs small screws, and one has to be careful not to break the wood of the box.  So after measuring, setting, getting the screws in for one arm, removing them cutting some cardstock paper to act as a washer, and use a bit of super glue to strengthen the paper.  I added glue to the hole for the screw, and got it all in place to ensure that the screw won't come out, and doesn't go all the way through the sides of the box.

And this is hardly the end of my tinkering.  I need to make up a collapsible dice box, one that folds up and stows away in the box.  But how to do that?  Well prototyping things out always helps.



Well once I work out how to fold it all up, I will make a cardboard version, then I'll get some wood and work out the actual building from there.

When I have sometime.  A new semester of classes started and it's all about photoshop, illustrator, and web animation.  Time consuming - but interesting and very helpful skills to acquire.