Seeing pictures of ancient dice inspired me to make them out of concrete. Throughout history dice were probably carved from stone, maybe wood, but for sure bone. Here is a nice link showing how to make these old dice out of antler. Last week I had a reason to make a small rubber test mould (to see how well polyurethane rubber would cast against plasticine sprayed with an acrylic lacquer).
The positive shape is made by hand, and the tool on the right in the photo below hollows out the pips. Form walls are 1″ thick pink foam wrapped in packing tape, then stuck to the base board with spray adhesive. The plasticine positive is just pressed onto the board gently, with the number 1 side down.
Mix 2 part rubber and pour it into the mould.
Pour from one place until the mould is filled.
After the rubber has cured, remove the form walls and gently remove the plasticine positive. Unfortunately a lot of air gets trapped in the small holes on the die, maybe it would help to pour the rubber from the bottom up, very slowly. Anyway the test worked out, which was really the point here.
Cast a concrete die, smooth the top flat. Remove the piece from the form after the concrete has cured and make the single hole with a masonry bit. Sand the sides with diamond hand pads to get them as equal as possible. Clean out the holes with some metal tool like an awl.
It’s much heavier than the acetate dice casinos use today, but it’s so much more tactile. It has a nice loud sound when it’s rolled, and something about this picture reminds me of the Flinstones meet the Jetsons movie.
