After the holiday break I figured it was time to get back in the shop and finish this table!

I started by adding dimension to my Sketchup model:

I found a piece of highly figured sapele at Saroyan a few months ago, and held onto it with any particular project in mind, but this one fits the bill! First up was cutting it down to rough size (and got to put the other half back on the wood rack for the future):

After jointing and planing I ripped it to rough width, with a big 45° angle on the top edge:

After some miter cuts I have an actual tower:

Gluing these up is made easy with the Blue Tape Trick to hold the miters tight while the glue sets (no glue yet, just a rough fit to make sure everything is square:

I pulled some scrap ebony off the rack to make the little tumblers that the dice fall on to help shuffle them:

The last job of the day was to glue a back to the base that actually gets attached to the table. The back is only 1/2” thick so I clamped it to some right angle blocks to make sure it set at 90°:

Tomorrow I’ll start gluing up everything else and installing hinges.

Yesterday was spent fitting the “frame” of the tower to the table itself:

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And cutting mortises for hinges. The dice towers are going to be hinged in two places:

Each using a pair of hinges. I went with Brusso CB-301 hinges for all of them. The hinge needs a 3/4” long x 13/32” wide x 3/32” deep mortise. Trying to hold one of these tiny hinges against the wood and trace around it is near impossible. But a marking gauge makes it easy. Set the cutter to the the dimension you need by referencing the hinge itself, then transfer that to the board:

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After some chisel work we’ve got a perfect pocket for the hinge:

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About Hinges

Something to note about hinges: there are two ways you can mount them. You can make them flush the surface and have the barrel (the round edge of the hinge containing the pin) completely exposed. When closed the two halves sit together nicely, but when you open them there will be a small gap between the two pieces. You can see that here in my tool chest:

If you’re doing big doors like this that’s totally fine. But if you want the two halves to rotate perfectly on their corners and have no gap, you need to mortise the hinge a little deeper than normal so that the rotation point of the two halves is the center of the hinge pin:

And to do that you just need to make sure you’re setting the marking gauge to that point at the center of the pin, not just to the size of the hinge leaf itself. Now the two rotate exactly on their corners:

I missed an update last week!

Two Weekends Ago

After another set of hinges were cut (the top to the back):

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After that I was able to fit a test out the enter mechanism:

This Weekend

I finished up the actual tower of dice towers:

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I also built the “fence” that keep the dice contained after falling through the tower:

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The last major part of the tower is the “holding area” at the top. I saw this being a place to put your dice between rolls. I set up some fences on the router table so I could accurately route a “tray” for the dice:

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Now, when the tower is open, there’s a lot of weight out front that tries to try and pull the tower closed. The holding area cantilevers out the opposite side:

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But it’s not nearly as heavy as the weight of the tower out front. But, I planned for this! I routed some extra depth and added lead weights. These are the weights used at the tire shop to balance your wheels!

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Adding 20 weights (10 oz.) gives the top enough weight to easily hold the tower open!

The last piece of the puzzle was attaching the tower to the back. I decided to attach it via dowels. I drilled holes in the back of the tower and then used dowel centers to mark their locations on the back:

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Once the matching holes were drilled I clamped the tower to the back:

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Here’s the closed mechanism, where you can see the tower nesting inside the fence at the bottom. This is the reason I went with 45° miters on the top of the tower and sides of the fence: so they can nest inside of each other, maximizing the height of the tower itself:

There’s about a 1/16th inch to spare!

After a bunch of sanding, they’re ready for finish!

Third coat of finish went on this morning, so assembly and install are happening tomorrow!

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The day has come! The final coat of wax went onto the dice towers today, then they were assembled and installed. I used some of the left-over microsuede from the drawers for the holding area at the top and the pen at the bottom:

Here it is in action, and that sound!

Another shot of them rolling through the tumblers:

Now that the table is done I’ll take some beauty shots and do a full video walkthrough, probably this weekend. You may be able to notice from the photos that the newly waxed wood definitely sticks out compared to the surrounding surfaces! After a week or so the wax will loose some of its sheen and match the surrounding wood, but I’m going to put another coat on everything else, so it looks great for the photos.