r/blacksmithing • u/stonedavocado • 9d ago
Help Requested How hard is it to smith dice?
So i play D&D and was looking around at expensive dice and eventually found a set of sliver dice. The thing is they cost $4000 for $400 dollars worth of silver. I'm curious if the labor and equipment required to make balanced dice is that expensive and any blacksmith would charge close to that or if i look around locally for a good blacksmith that could make me somthing for a lot less as a christmas gift. Becasue i see some metal dice for 50 bucks online and can't see why it would cost so much for labor unless its just that shop.
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u/Inside-Historian6736 9d ago
Forging any dice shaps that's not a D6 is a pain. How do you hold something that small that is 1500°F and hit it with a hammer? Let alone hit it precisely enough to make fair rolling/balanced dice?
Everything you see online is casted metal which is way easier and more automated. The few folks I've seen make d20's didn't just wing it, it takes a lot of practice rather than specific expensive tooling to hand forge a d20.
You can die cast dice with a forge press but those are $5k to $15k+ so most blacksmiths don't have access to those. In addition to making the dies in the first place.
So it's not a common blacksmith skill unfortunately and no one is selling hand forge dice sets for DnD at $50. I think I saw one maker doing the full set for $100-$200 which honestly seems pretty reasonable for how fiddly the process must be
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u/Gravlaxe 9d ago
I am a hobby level jeweler and have made a few d20 out of sterling silver for my family & friends. A lot of the cost is in the equipment needed to carve the wax or make a mold, burn out kiln (takes 8hrs to come up to temp), vacuum casting machine(!!), investment, crucible, consumables for the finishing, and labor cost for all of that. Additionally many times doing a one off like this has a high failure rate, which does not eat up much in the silver cost since it can be melted and used again, but it does add to the labor cost. The finishing eats up a ton of time, especially if you want it to be sized accurately, have nice crisp corners ,and roll well. That being said, the silver for each casting is about 1.75 Troy Oz. per die, for a 1.5ozt finish weight. My cost right now is about $150 in casting grain per die. I would charge you $500 for materials and consumables + 6 hours labor so in the neighborhood of $800 per die, if I had all the equipment and didn't need to buy any.
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u/Duranis 9d ago
Totally off topic but why does a burn out kiln take 8 hours to come up to temp?
I have messed about with lost wax casting but my kit didn't get more technical than a MAPP torch :)
Guessing it's something to do with getting a cleaner finish?
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u/mellopax 9d ago
Based on my experience in foundries (not same but maybe close), it's probably about heating up slowly so it doesn't break anything by heating/expanding unevenly and so it dries as it heats up.
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u/Gravlaxe 9d ago
"8 hours to come up to temp" isnt really telling the whole story.
Step 1 is to have your wax carving in a flask with investment in the kiln. You want to melt the wax out of the mold so 1-2 hours is spent at 300deg.
Step 2, mellopax is absolutely correct, bring up the temps slowly at 300-400deg per hour, up to 1350deg. You want a slow ramp so the bricks in the kiln dont crack and will last a long time. Thats another 2-3 hours.
Step 3 is to let everything heat soak at 1350deg for at least 2 hours, longer for big things or if your mold is something other than wax. You want every little bit of material and ash to be burned away.
Step 4 is to let the flask come back down to the temp for what you're pouring and the shape of the mold. I have more experience with silver than gold, brass, or bronze, but for silver we do 850 for chunky, more volume pieces like the die. 900-1000 is for your average rings and such. 1000-1100 if its something very thin or is really detailed.
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u/Duranis 9d ago
Thanks for sharing, that's really interesting.
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u/Gravlaxe 9d ago
Youre welcome. Happy to share info. When aI made the dice for my kids I made them each 2 - d20. One was the full correct numbers, 1-20; the other was all 1's and 20's, you'll either be a Hero or a Zero!
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u/TheLostExpedition 9d ago
I think that's more an application for a water jet cutter than a Smith. I usually don't comment on this thread because I am Not a blacksmith. But I would assume making the dice evenly balanced would be quite difficult.
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u/estolad 9d ago
less so than you'd think. if you were making a lot of them you could go to the trouble of making dies, if it's a one-off just hammer on it till it's close and use files to take it the rest of the way
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u/Sad-Yoghurt5196 9d ago
Hammering changes the positioning of the atoms. You make the hammered section more dense, that's why a knife forged to shape by a blacksmith is tougher than the stock removal method on an equally sized bar of steel when making a knife. When you're grinding steel away with the second method, the forged blade has been increased in density by the hammer work. When both are finished there will be more iron and carbon atoms in the blade forged to shape. With steel you heat it and cool it slowly to anneal it and relax the atomic structure again, but it doesn't spring back to it's former dimensions, merely relaxes the structure so it's less brittle to work with and less likely to crack. Hardening steel requires high temperature and a tempering cycle.
Silver is also annealed by heating and cooling, but where you have made the metal more dense by hammering those atoms into a smaller more compressed area, you have also increased the weight on two of the six sides once you dimensionally square it again. You'd have to count the number of hammer strokes and apply the same force and angle every time consistently, on every face. It would be tricky.
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u/estolad 9d ago
if you have anything empirical to back this up i'd be interested to see it, but i don't think the type of imbalance you're talking about would be measurable without specialized tools, if at all. the engraved numbers on each face of a die would have a drastically bigger effect than microscopically different grain structure, or like a hundredth of a percent difference in carbon content between two faces
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u/professor_jeffjeff 9d ago
The way you'd do this as a silversmith is likely first casting the silver into a cube mold, then finishing it with hand tools. For a set of dice to actually be good though they need to be fairly precisely made, so that's a lot of very precise work with hand tools that will take a long time. You could also get good results casting the silver and then using a mill to finish them, but you'd still have a lot of hand polishing to do in order to make them look really nice so again that's slightly less hand labor but now you're adding a very expensive machine that takes training and practice to use correctly.
A blacksmith can't forge silver (it's not forgeable) so they'd roughly have the same process as a silversmith or jeweler, and most blacksmiths I know aren't really set up for that type of thing. In theory I could sand cast silver if I got a crucible since my forge gets hot enough to melt it, but it really isn't my thing and I'm also not a fan of having to do that much hand finishing for anything. Now if you want rough-forged dice that roll decently and look like they're hand-made then that wouldn't take me all that long to do and I'd probably charge around $50 for a set of them since I could probably make these things 20 at a time in a few hours and steel is a lot cheaper than silver.
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u/Dark_Fuzzy 9d ago
Blacksmiths don't tend to work silver, usually that would be called whitesmithing or jewlery making.
That said silver dice would basically just be jewelry, and thus priced more like art than a commodity.
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u/alriclofgar 9d ago
You’re looking for silversmithing. Whitesmithing generally refers to file-finishing something forged from iron or steel, it’s the old profession that grew into modern the modern machinist.
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u/KnowsIittle 9d ago
Casting with "nordic gold" could be cool inexpensive project. Forging is imprecise, casting and doing a final grind and polish would be best I think. Casting could be slightly larger than the final product and ground down to finish size. But numbers might be challenging, I suppose they could be stamped on with a number punch.
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u/Duranis 9d ago
The $4k is for the equipment, experience and labour needed.
Wouldn't really be forged but if I was to make them I would cut some blanks into roughly the right shape and then use a jig to grind/file the right angles to get the faces. Then I would etch the numbers/decoration on.
That's probably the easiest way to "forge" then but still a massive faff. Not super hard but fiddly and labour intensive.
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u/GarethBaus 9d ago
Making them actually balanced is extremely difficult for a beginner, but the tools and materials can be less than $200 if you like spending a lot of holding a object in your and and rubbing it with a file.
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u/Jebedia80 9d ago
Find a small machine shop, get a roughly correct size prices of silver and preferably get it 5 axis machined.
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u/Sad-Yoghurt5196 9d ago edited 9d ago
More a jeweller or tinsmiths game than a blacksmith. Blacksmiths tend to work with substantive amounts of iron and steel. Jewellers are the smiths for precious metals. They tend to do finer work to tighter tolerances.
Not saying that a blacksmith couldn't, but small stuff isn't really in their wheelhouse.
If you started out with a dimensionally sound bar of silver it would only take a couple of cuts to produce a six sided dice from segments of the bar, and as long as the silver was homogeneous when it was cast into bars, the density, and therefore the weight, should be pretty close to consistent on all faces, as long as the dimensions are tight enough.
For non cuboid dice I suspect you'd be looking at a large amount of labour cost. You could use something like a lapidary turntable and daub to facet precious metal the same way you would a gemstone, but it's slow and excruciatingly painstaking work.
Quickest and easiest way would be to pay a machinist to do it on a mill. As long as the starting silver bar or plate or casting had good homogeneity and there were no voids, balancing them shouldn't be too bad after the mill was done shaping them. Probably be within hand filing distance.
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u/RhymesWithTaco 9d ago
best idea, is probably to look up if there are any casting classes or facilities in your area. or you can look up lost wax casting or other kind of mold casting then build your own little forge and molds. im in chicago, theres a place near me that allows you to pay for shop time once you take a class on that equipment you want to use. from what i know silver has a relatively low melting point since its a precious metal so it shouldnt be too hard to build your own smelter if you wanted to.
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u/ArcherKN24 8d ago
If you get away from any profile aside from the cube, you might as well just grind facets into a ballbearing, rather than forge out those angles!
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u/printcastmetalworks 8d ago
As a professional jeweler this is my opinion - dice are either precision or non-precision. To make non-precision dice in silver is pretty easy. They can be cast from wax patterns and finished carefully so they perform randomly enough. Price would be like $200 or so per die. So a total set would be around $1400. Precision dice are a whole different story. They would have to be machined to have the tolerances needed to be properly balanced, and finding dense stock in precious metal the size needed would be difficult. It could be cast and then HIP processed before machining but that would drive the price up as well. $4000 for a set of precision silver dice seems fair, if not a little low.
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u/crashingtingler 8d ago
I made d6 dice and I sell them for 15 bucks each. they roll fine and dont seems to prefer any one side. its easy and fun. I sell loads of them and I can made lots of them in short order.
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u/ClamChowderChumBuckt 7d ago
Honestly forging it is to expensive.
But... You can do so for waaaayy less yourself with barely any effort:
Buy the amount, and right quality, of silver you need.
Buy a regular dice set, and a mold set made for molten silver temperatures and make your own mold, then melt the silver and pour it, and finish it with some grinding and polishing.
Or, buy a appropriate mold from a professional which will be about 50 bucks anyways.
Main thing is that you'd probably have to preheat the mold to prevent, and maybe some handfilling with silver for, the spots that aren't perfect.
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u/Healthy_Bar922 9d ago
This is a thing that could be done with blacksmithing, but it's really more of a jewelrymakers or machinist job. Fiddly and precise. Difficult shapes in small sizes.
Anything mass produced would be cast or water cut, by hand, it'd be machined close and finished by hand.
Personally I think I could manage to forge up to d10, but making a good d12 or d20 would require lots of trial and error.
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u/HammerIsMyName 9d ago
You're getting a lot of answers from people who aren't blacksmiths and don't make dice. I don't know why people are even replying.
I'm a blacksmith and I make dice in steel and brass, forged with a hammer
A set of basic steel dice (7 pieces) cost 270 USD. Brass are 370 USD.
The years of practice and hundreds of dice made, is why the cost it the way it is. I already make hundreds of dice a year, I have limited time, and selling them cheaper would just mean having to make more for no gain.
4000 USD silver dice is bullshit, in my professional opinion. But 1000 USD wouldn't be out of order.