Why?
My father-in-law has a neat ministry he does with kids in the neighborhood playing basketball, but also likes to have yard games for the kids that don’t play basketball. I was itching for a quick small project and had a short 4x4 cedar post lying around.
What?
I decided to use the 4x4 cedar post to make some large sized dice you could play with in the yard or driveway. It just happened to be big enough for five equally sized cubes so I started by cutting the cubes out with my chop saw.
I drew out the layout of the pips (using a real die for reference).
I used my drill press and a 1⁄2” bit to drill out the pips.
I painted the pips with some gloss black enamel
I used my oscillating sander to sand the sides smooth and take off the excess paint, then router table with a 1⁄2” roundover bit to round them off.
I attempted to put some poly on them and it came out terrible so I just sanded it off and left it au natural. I doubt we’ll be rolling these into puddles of water anyways. It turned out pretty well! My wife helpfully pointed out that Farkle requires six dice so I managed to find another scrap of cedar to build a sixth.
I picked up a galvanized bucket and called it done!
Lessons learned
- I should have done the routing before drilling the pips, as my router bearing dove into the holes once or twice.
- I purposefully painted outside the pips because I thought sanding after the fact would make nice, clean pips. What I missed was that the wood grain would soak up the paint some and bleed out of the pips. A Q-tip proved to be a much better solution for painting the pips on the sixth die.
Tools
Obligatory pic of the shop.
