Dice Molds From AliExpress and Wish | Cheap Dice Mold Review | Budget Buys Ep. 47

what is up my peepholes this is your guy cly and welcome back to budget buys with a side order of DIY today I'm gonna be talking about resin molds specifically dice resin molds I found these little guys on Aliexpress of all places and that's kind of big news because until recently if you wanted to get your hands on pre-made ice molds you had to go on to Etsy or similar websites where you'd end up getting a mold like this one for about $20 per mold and you need 7 of those to make a die set now you might get lucky and find a seller willing to do a package deal where you can get all seven molds for $100 but that's still $100 and that's been a big barrier of entry for a lot of people that want to get into this hobby now of course I'm not trying to throw shade on the people selling the dice molds because I understand what goes into it I mean heck I made these dice molds myself at the end of the day that price really isn't for the materials that are used in making the mold instead you're paying for the sellers time as well as their specialized tools and knowledge heck the mold I just showed you only used up about one to two dollars worth of silicone and if you wanted a translucent mold like these you're going to be paying about two to three dollars for the silicone and yes there is a point to making the molds translucent because not only does that allow you to see what's going on inside if you're doing a complicated design but it also allows you to use UV curing resin so keep that in mind I can tell you first hand that it is an extremely tedious process to prepare your dyes for making the mold to cut the dice out of the silicone once everything's cured especially if you don't want to ruin your master dies in the process and if you want to ensure that the molds are bubble free you're going to need to use a pressure pot or vacuum chamber neither of which is cheap now that I've ranted a little bit about the pricing structure of pre-made molds as well as what goes into making them yourself let's talk about how much I paid for these would you believe about a dollar each now on Aliexpress there are three different ways that I've come across to get your hands on these molds the first option is to buy them individually for about one to two dollars each depending on the cell you go with and if you're willing to wait one to two months to get your hands on molds there are some sellers that opera free shipping otherwise you're going to be paying about $3 in order to get them in two to three weeks of course I don't know if all of these sellers combine shipping on the molds so you might end up paying $4 per mold and that is less than ideal fortunately there are sellers that offer the entire seven piece set for about five dollars plus the three dollars shipping that I mentioned earlier I have yet to come across the seller that offers free shipping on these but they're bound to pop up at some point there's also the option that I went with which was the 19 piece set for eleven dollars plus three dollars shipping so I paid about fourteen dollars for this entire set of molds and it took about three weeks to arrive and I bet some of you just got confused because I said 19 pieces and 19 isn't cleanly divisible by seven it would make more sense if I said I got the 14 piece set or the 21 piece set so what's up with that and the truth is I got 19 completely different molds and not only did I get these standard seven piece set that includes the D for D 6 D 8 D 10 D 10 percentile D twelve and B 20 but I also got a d 6 with pips a fudge dye which for those of you who have no idea what this is it's a D 6 with two blank faces two plus faces and two minus faces used in the fudge RPG system as well as the Fate RPG system and all of their derivatives because they're on the open game license there's also this really oddly shaped die which believe it or not it's meant to be a D tin a D 24 a massive d6 with a blank face a blank face with a dot as well as the letters A through D a massive D 20 that has a selection of letters on it that's used for a board game that I can't quite remember I know it's used for a board game because I found a ruined copy of it one time all dumpster-diving and decided to keep the d20 if you know what game this comes from let me know down in the comments below last but not least there is the oversized a partial die set and I say partial because it includes the d4 d6 d8 d-10 d12 and D 20 and for those of you wondering no I will not be testing all these molds out in this video because I don't have the resin budget for it however if you stick around I will show you a standard die set that I made using these molds now before I show you what the dice out of these molds look like let's take a moment to focus on how they work as you can see these are two-part molds and the cap has a little bit of extra silicone extending around the edge as well as a little tab and what you do with this is you slide it underneath this lip here like so give it a little bit of a tug and a squeeze and you can get everything set the way you need and it's ready to fill now let's just Center that up though it's not mandatory and I've got to admit the inclusion of that tab is a great design decision because in a lot of cases you don't want the face getting rotated especially in the case of a d4 because while it won't really affect the other dice on a die set on a d4 it can render it completely unusable as for how you fill these molds you could try using them as squish molds where you fill them up and then put the cap on top but personally I prefer to use the center fill hole with either a pipette a syringe or the weird syringe pipette hybrid that I showed you in my pumpkin spice dice video anyway let's move on to the part a lot of you came here for and show you what the dice out of these molds look like okay I'm not gonna lie I absolutely love how these turned out but it wasn't exactly a painless process in fact there are a couple of flaws inherent in these molds that made me nearly lose this entire die set though as you can see I was able to save them it just means I'm posting this video a little bit later than intended now the main issue with these molds is right here this is the hole that you use to get your resin into the mold and it's a bit on the law sigh now while that's great for when you're injecting your resin since it allows the air in the mold to flow outwards and helps mitigate air bubbles it's going to add a good bit of time to your sanding schedule typically what I do when making my own molds is use a toothpick to make my injection point and the end result is a nice narrow sprue that can be easily snipped or sanded off but it takes a bit longer with this chunker right here even worse it's not the biggest one in the set also I should point out that there is no reservoir on these molds and that means that if you're like me and you use a viscous resin and a pressure pot make darn sure there's no air bubbles in your resin otherwise you might end up doing what I did and have to rescue your dice because when I pulled them out of the pressure pot the first time there was a huge divot where all of the resin receded and that does not make for a good final product fortunately as you can see I was able to save these by doing a secondary injection but I would honestly prefer not having to do that which is where these reservoirs come in very handy but a little extra resin in there and everything fills in as it pressurizes now the next time I use these molds what I'm gonna try to do is build up my own a reservoir using hot glue because the hot glue should get close enough to the silicone to form a seal so that the resin doesn't seep out when everything's pressurized but at the same time silicone doesn't stick to anything but silicone so I'll be able to remove it when everything's done and the mold will be no worse for wear the other big issue I encounter with these molds has to do with the d4 itself because this base is very narrow if you're going to put it inside of a pressure pot like I did make sure to surround it with other molds because if you jostle the pressure pot while sealing it it's going to tip over and you'd rather not have that happen with uncured resin inside just a little heads-up now that I've got my main critiques out of the way let's move on to something that I bet some of you were hoping to see and that's a D moulding because I mixed up a little bit too much resin when I making this set and as such I ended up casting ad 24 and D molding these things is actually really simple all you've got to do is first take off any excess resin at the top here next open it up peel out the cap like so and then wring it out fortunately these molds aren't extremely durable and pop back in shape no problem an added advantage of these being so cheap is the fact that it will wear out eventually you're probably going to get maybe 30 or so uses out of these but it's a dollar to replace now before I move on any further let's just take a closer look at this freshly d molded de 24 and as you can see I wasn't kidding when I said this Peru was a bit on the chunky side also there is a bit of flaring where the cap was but fortunately it's not really that hard to sand it down because the other sides act as a nice flat sanding guide also I just noticed this when I was shooting this part but the twelve and fourteen are actually off-center in order to make up for the additional volume used on this face I just thought that was kind of neat and if you need any further proof that it's going to sand down nice and cleanly let's just take a look at the d20 because it had a bit of that issue when it came to the one face I honestly thought I was going to end up losing detail on the 13 7 and 19 here but as you can see it looks really nice when sanded the extra bit of material actually went all the way to the base of these numerals so I was pleasantly surprised when everything turned out oh so pretty now that I've got the bad parts of these molds of the way let me go ahead and sing their praises because at the end of the day I absolutely love these things and not only are these moulds insanely cost-effective like I mentioned earlier but they're also incredibly easy to use as long as you know about the issues I mentioned earlier also thanks to the incredibly sharp profile on these dice and the fact that the mold lines only take up a single face you're going to have a very easy time cleaning these up despite the added sanding needed for the extra wide sprue getting the mold lines to affect a single base like that is incredibly difficult when making your own molds though sometimes you might get lucky like I did with this deform mold and other times you won't be so lucky and you'll end up having your seam a run through a number just like I did here in fact I like this mold design so much that I'm using it as a basis for some of the custom master dice that I'm getting ready to 3d print originally I was just going to print custom dice and then make a mold using this method but I've been converted I'll just be sure to include a reservoir in my final mold design speaking of masters that is a huge advantage this mold set has over all of the other ones I've seen online while there are people out there that 3d print their own masters and then make molds from those most people are going to be using retail dice because they're much more readily available the downside to that is they're typically processed in tumbled which removes material surrounds the edges and so on and so forth and the final result will be dice like these and while that's not necessarily a bad thing you have to be very careful when processing these because you can change up the geometry significantly since they were processed frye are you making a mold out of them also sharp edged dice are incredibly in right now and if you wanted to make those from these you're going to be losing a significant amount of material of course there are other options when it comes to making sharp edged dice like using game science dice which are lauded as being untold and straight from the factory and admittedly usually come without their numbers inked or you can use metal dice like these that were kindly sent to me by palette and roll playing but neither of those scenarios can hold a candle to the quality of dice you get out of molds made straight from a master and now for a jarring cut because I have a last-minute addition to this video while I was doing a little last-minute research on these molds I saw you customer reviews of these on Aliexpress and some people are saying that these molds look pretty much identical to the dice made by dispel and after taking a closer look myself I'm going to say they are indeed very similar however that doesn't really change my opinion on these molds because as I mentioned earlier most of the molds on the market are made from retail dyes but those are made by somebody pouring silicone around the existing dye and these molds are obviously injection molded into parts heck if you take a closer look you can even see the seam line on these molds and that means that these were made using masters that were purpose-built for making molds admittedly there is still the slight possibility that somebody got their hands on the Masters that dispell uses to make their molds but it's more likely that the manufacturers of these molds are using either the same font or a font in the same family and I've done enough research on fonts for my channel art and thumbnails to tell you that it's a bit of a gray area there because it's very easy to find fonts that are free for commercial use that are near identical to the ones that will cost you an arm and a leg to use on your products and of course the sharp-edged regular solids used to make most of these dice are very easy to make in whichever 3d modelling program you want to use anyway I just wanted to point that out before wrapping this video up in case that will influence your opinion but like I said it doesn't really influence mine the existence of these molds still makes this Hobby infinitely more accessible than it was just a couple months ago now back to our regularly scheduled video so if you liked what you saw here and would like to get your hands on some of these molds I'm gonna go ahead and leave some affiliate links down in the description below both for Aliexpress where I originally picked up these molds as well as for Amazon because they're slowly making their way to Amazon's fulfillment warehouses and I happen to come across the 19 a mold set available on Amazon Prime with two days shipping or around 19 or 20 dollars which is not much more than what I paid for these and you don't have to wait three weeks and I'm also going to keep an eye out for the seven piece set on Amazon and add that as a pinned comment when that available I know it's already available on Amazon if you're willing to wait for international shipping but at that point it's not much different from ordering komali Express and on that note I think I'm gonna go polish up at v.24 so until next time this is your guy cly signing off

Channel: Cly Faker

Views: 41,766

Keywords: dungeons and dragons, dice review, dungeons and dragons dice, d&d, dnd, dnd dice, diy dice, handmade dice, dice molds, resin dice, custom dice, resin dice molds, dice molds for resin, resin casting, resin casting dice, buy dice molds, cheap dice molds, aliexpress dice molds, wish dice molds, dice mold, wish dice mold, aliexpress dice mold, dice mold review, dice mold tutorial, mold making, dice mold making, silicone dice mold, diy dice molds, silicone mold, resin molds

Id: IrAdYABjqWA

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Aggrons_shell]

I just watched a similar video about the same set of molds, but I feel like anyone who's thinking of buying them should at least consider the moral implications of these molds.

[u/CleverGirlReads]

I got these same exact molds on Amazon recently. Used them for the first time last night. I'm excited to see how they turn out when I demold them soon. Thanks for the video.

[u/Cly_Faker]

I recently got my hands on the cheapo dice molds that have been popping up on AliExpress and Wish lately, and I just wanted to share my thoughts. With an average price of $1 per mold there really wasn't anything to lose. lol

If you want to take a closer look at the dice, here they are:

https://imgur.com/a/K3MLu0L

[u/Jinxx_Swims]

Your videos are really cool!!

[u/icouldstartover]

What brand or type of resin do you use? I have these same molds but I’ve been having issues with bubbling so I’m wondering if it’s an issue with the type I’m using.

[u/hamptont2010]

Thank you so so much for making this video! I have my own silicone dice molds I made but I've been eyeing these bad boys for a few weeks now. It's nice to know that they are effective and durable. I will definitely be purchasing them and you've also got yourself a new sub :)