Antique mechanical dice
Dug North spotted this gem in a recent (and now unfortunately closed) eBay listing. Would love to hear what it sounds like when you pull the lever.
dice
Online dice collections
Shown above is a small sample of Justin Michell’s meticulously-documented dice collection over at Kevin Cook’s DiceCollector.com. Justin’s is one of six collections, besides Kevin’s own, hosted at the site, which makes for fascinating browsing. Most folks’ experience of dice is limited to the simple Platonic-solid dice, but of the first 20 integers, only 1-, 17- and 19-sided dice are not represented in Justin’s collection.
Disclosure: I got wind of Justin’s collection when he contacted me about putting my old design for an alphabet die up on Shapeways, which I did. His print in stainless steel is shown uppermost. I make two bucks for each one they print.
Hollow metal 6-sider
The world’s hardest-working dice fanatic is up to his usual tricks. Barcelona, Spain maker Abraham Neddermann created this excellent hollow die that he calls Structural Integrity. Well…finally I managed to finish this troublesome build. I’d like to state that I used the verb “build” instead of craft/make or others, because in the end, doing this […]
Electronic symbol dice
We’ve covered Abraham Neddermann recently, this guy is obsessed with gaming dice. That’s a plus in my book, and the fact that he’s a true maker as well can only add points. He runs a store on Ebay selling his creations, and my favorite are his handmade electronic symbol dice inlaid in brass. In case […]
Homemade die engraver
I’ve been following Barcelona maker Abraham Neddermann’s Dicecreator blog for a while. True to the blog’s name, he dabbles in creating his own tabletop gaming dice, machining them out of aluminum or printing on blank dice. This time he’s outdone himself, building a laser engraver out of junk parks, a couple of stepper motor control […]
Che Guevara in dice
Silicon Valley software engineer Ari Krupnik makes what he calls “pixel mosaics” as a hobby. Besides dice, he’s also used bullet casings and M&Ms. You may have seen Ari in this full-page ShopBot ad in MAKE 14. His rendering of Che Guevara, above, uses 400 black dice. He’s also done one of George Orwell. (“Maybe one day my prose can be as fluid as his,” says Ari–hear, hear!) This page includes another dice example and some good detail on Ari’s process.
How-To: Generate dice mosaics from image files
Michael Boehm saw our post a couple of weeks ago about Etsy seller Stukenborg’s letterpress prints using dice as “type,” which mentioned the idea of using the same technique for making pixel-based images as well as geometric patterns. He got interested in the idea, went off to experiment, and eventually produced the dice-mosaic version of Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres shown above. When he posted the results in the comment thread, I asked for, and he was nice enough to provide, a written explanation of the method, which uses Mark Probst’s open-source photomosaic utility Metapixel. I’ve reproduced Michael’s e-mail, with only minor edits, below. [Thanks, Michael!]
