My adventures in dice-making are going well, but going slowly.

I've been working my way through the backlog of commission requests, but not nearly at the pace I'd like. Part of it was working out the process and schedule, part of it was plain old bad brain times. At the moment, when I'm really on schedule and cranking things out, I can finish two sets per week, three max. I've got at least 20 orders in the queue.

Some of it is unavoidable because I'm still committed to using UV resin. Despite it curing much faster than epoxy resin, it turns out to not really save me much time. Turns out you can spend twice as much time to polish something to be half again as good, and there isn't really an upper limit on how many times you can do that. Dice is a hobby for perfectionists, so I've been trying to get the dice into adequate shape without overdoing it. Still, when you factor in the sanding, the washing, the polishing, the painting and the second polishing, 7-10 dice every two to three days is my max right now.

Epoxy resin dice makers have solved some of these problems in ways I can't use with UV resin, but I'm still committed to this process because I think it's exciting. I sit down and I start trying things and trying things gives me more ideas for things to try. It's a lot like software engineering in that way. Having to wait 24 hours for epoxy resin to set to see if I had a good idea doesn't excite me at all.

Part of it is going to speed up soon. I've been working with a local friend with a machine shop to make a few tools that let me work faster with the resin, and we're even looking at producing more to sell to other crafters. I can't talk about that much now, but I'm excited about it.

A few people on the (very helpful!) discord for the dicemaking subreddit were skeptical there was any reason to use UV over epoxy for both time and quality reasons, but I'm convinced it's a useful new tool that people can incorporate into their process that allows for designs that aren't possible or practical otherwise, and I'm stubborn enough to make everyone agree with me by proving it.

Still, I have quite a few finished dice that I've produced while experimenting for people's commissions, and I'd like to start selling them online.

I did a set for the Oakland Cat Town cat cafe that fetched $180 at a charity auction, which is considerably more than I've been charging for commissions. So, my first toe in the water is this eBay auction for a pair of D6es I made. Granted, it was a charity auction, which makes people generous, but if I've been lowballing myself for one-of-a-kind dice, maybe I can take this more out of "side hustle" territory. This might help me gauge that.

Here's the dice!

And just to show off, here's a few more I've been working on over the past month or so.

Since I announced I was a guy who makes dice I've been inundated with a wave of orders. Thank you, everyone.

I'm not completing these as fast as I would like, partly because I've spent the past two weeks getting a demo together for someone to pitch to VCs for using an LLM to give medical advice*, so I've barely been able to work on the commissions. A lot of people have been very kind about me saying I'm backed up and will have to get back to them once I've worked through the list a little.

In the meantime, here's pictures of a few completed projects.

This teaser image isn't a completed project but I think this is going to be very cool.



* not really**

** kind of though

Perhaps you would like to commission some?

I got into dicemaking a hobby after attending a UV resin craft workshop, made a few, and then people started wanting to buy them.

UV resin is kind of an untested way to make dice, and most people use epoxy resin, which takes a day to set instead of a few minutes. The disadvantage is I have more trouble with bubbles in the resin and warped surfaces. The advantage is that I can experiment and iterate rapidly, and take some risks with wild inclusions. Here's a few I made for friends:

One of my first orders was someone who wanted a gift for someone GMing a campaign where all the players were dog-riding weed-smuggling halflings, so we worked out some dice with weed and dog glitter and blacklight-reactive resin and paint.

Someone else wanted a set of disease-themed d6 to use as counters in a Warhammer game, which I did with dried moss. (He painted the numbers himself later.)

I'm slow-rolling this a bit because I'm still working out if this process is viable or if I'll have to eventually move to epoxy resin, but I've gotten a lot better at polishing them, and I'm trying out all kinds of new stuff. This set will be going up for auction soon to benefit the Oakland Cat Town cat cafe.

It doesn't pay the rent yet, but it's been an exceptionally stupid year to be looking for a software engineering job (which I wrote about some on Mastodon) and every job posting is something like "Can you help us wire up a ChatGPT bot to give people medical advice?" so fuck it, we ball.

If you'd like to commission some, I'm opening it up to the readers of the comic first. Email me at matt@machallproductions.com and we can talk about themes and prices. I don't feel justified charging as much as some of the people on Etsy with more experience, but so far I haven't had any unhappy customers.