It’s been sitting at the bottom of a swamp for 5,000 years. And when it’s gone, it’s gone.īut some woods are just exotic because they’re seemingly impossible to get. It’s impossible to get more of it if you’re playing by the rules, so despite the huge backlog of buyers that he has for Boise de Rose dice, he’ll only make half a dozen products each year from the two logs he obtained from the last legal supplier in the U.S. One of his favorite woods, the Boise de Rose, has been illegal to import since 1968. But he’ll only buy from a legitimate company that funds reforestation projects in Africa. There’s endangered African Blackwood that’s easy to find if you don’t care if your source harvested the trees illegally. He could turn an even quicker buck if he cut corners. Image credit Artisan Dice.Īnd the dedication to finding new, beautiful woods to turn into dice translates into a cornucopia of woods, most of which I’ve never heard of outside of a master woodworker’s shop. I spend 10-15 hours a week sourcing my materials. We source from all over the world.” Bois de Rose Dice. You can’t just go down to the local lumber yard and buy these materials. “I like cool exotic materials, stuff no one has heard of…we do 150 different species of exotic woods. Artisan Dice offers up a staggering amount of rare and exotic wooden dice. We machine all kinds of really hard metals that machinists will go ‘I don’t want to touch that with a ten-foot pole.'”īut it’s not just metal that goes into the CNC machines. We do everything from aluminum, copper, brass, bronze, and stainless steel to niobium, nickel, tungsten, titanium.
Artisan dice upgrade#
Image credit Artisan Dice.Īnd they have to upgrade them, because those gorgeous metal dice take a toll on the equipment. We’re having to upgrade them with components now to make them ‘mini industrial’ machines.” Titanium Dice. What we’re doing right now is upgrading those machines that we’ve worn slap out because they’re not designed to do large production runs. We had to get high-end hobby grade machines made for small batches.
Here, Charlie pauses and muses for a bit on the disparity between the machines made for his product and the sheer volume of product he’d like to be able to put out to keep up with his fans. So I did everything just exactly wrong enough to make it work.” I didn’t know…I wasn’t a machinist, I wasn’t a woodworker when I started this. If you talk to a woodworker, they’ll tell you what we do can’t be done. “If you talk to a machinist, they’ll tell you that what we do can’t be done. Sure, there are other specialty dice out there (you can barely log in to Kickstarter without seeing one of them) but no one is trying to do the scale of production that Artisan Dice is. Artisan Dice now has dozens of metals, 150 woods, not to mention acrylics, carbon fiber, gator bone, stone, and other, even rarer materials. He got started a few years ago with blocks of exotic wood that he milled into fudge dice for his Dresden Files gaming group. And to that end, we’re always trying to make things better and better and better.” I’m constantly amazed at how rabid our fans are. It’s funny, I hated Math in school, now I’m surrounded by it every day! If you’d told me three years ago, we would be doing the volume of orders that we’re doing now, I would’ve told you that you were nuts. “I’m knee deep in spreadsheets trying to get our CNC machines back online. And he’s got a serious love/hate relationship with his process.
“The trick is finding a piece that’s suitable to being milled.”Ĭharlie is a passionate guy. “Mammoth ivory is actually a lot more common than you’d think.” He told me when I got a hold of him at his Dallas, Texas office. A quick turn around the ol’ Google later, and I found out they do exist and, at $248 for a single D20, as expensive as I suspected! Turns out this bit of geek alchemy is the brainchild of Charlie Brumfield, head of Artisan Dice. I thought it was amusing, except Gabe’s mammoth-ivory D20 sounded like one of those impossibly ridiculous, yet real things that only well-heeled gaming geeks purchased. Last month, Penny Arcade ran a comic about specialty dice.
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