How to Sand, Polish, and Finish Resin Dice

all right so you have your workshop all set up however messy it may be after a short while and you pressure casted your first set of dice or your fit or your tent if you're using spring molds or if you're using squish molds you're gonna have to do some of this as well but this just out of the mold with the large screw on the end does not a usable dice make plus you have this flashing which means just a little bit of care and cleanup so how do we turn this into something that you can actually roll and potentially sell online for your dice making addiction and those around you well that's what we're gonna talk about in this video [Music] now we're picking up immediately where we've left off at the end of the last video I'm using the clear silicone mold that I made in the sharp edge custom masters video that released on the channel here a couple weeks ago go check that out for everything you need to know to get to the point where you have resin in a mold you've cast it into a dice cured it in or not in your pressure pot and are ready to trim it D molding your dice is extremely important especially on sharp edge molds with very small sprue lines and especially especially on something like the d4 prying apart your silicone molds and having proper cut lines that allow you to overcome any areas where the dice is larger than the sprue or the current available opening for the dice to exit the mold is extremely important and don't hesitate to put a little bit of pressure on the bottom of the mold to help release the vacuum seal between the resin and the silicone so that you can actually get the mold out now I'm still perfecting my process as far as my resin pours so out of a twenty dice cast I usually see one potentially two that has a small bubble in it that was unable to escape during the pressure pot process or that didn't get compressed all the way where it's completely invisible these dice are normally ones I keep for myself and the rest get sanded and get ready to get sold through loot tables now that we have all the dice you see Miri rubber-banding each mold as I'm Dee molding it immediately after and this is just a workflow thing I've set up to be able to go from one casting to the next extremely quickly you don't have to do this and if you're just getting started I recommend not doing it and working through one set of dice from beginning to end so you get your idea on the whole process but the dice out I use these craft pruning shears which you can get for about ten to twelve dollars at your local store or on Amazon and I'll have an affiliate link to that and everything else down in the description and the important thing here is to not cut too close to the final die you can see on this d6 that I leave a good millimeter millimeter and a half between my initial cut where the goal is to just sever the sprue from the edge of the dice now we will over a few cuts make this a lot closer but the important thing is never to cut too closely and risk taking off too much material you can always remove more to make a cut more precise but you can never add anything back and once you cross that threshold the entire die is ruined so it's pays to be extremely careful and methodical when doing this I'll trim up usually within a half a millimeter at the absolute closest before switch to my second set of tools which are these exact Emma Ives now I've sharpened these and I regularly replace these blades a dull exacto knife is about as useful as a butter knife and blades only cost anywhere to from a quarter to fifty cents so it's extremely important to replace these regularly I like to place the die on a piece of wood so I don't risk cutting the silicon mat or my fingers or anything else that's extremely important and pressing down in a slight direct pull sawing motion moving from one end of the razor blade to the other and then resetting the blade and starting over you don't want to just press because then you risk compressing the resin and causing an unclean cut which would cause you to dig into the dice and we're back to the same problem of if you cut into the die it's useless usually one to two passes through a single straw sprue is more than enough to cut off the dice and again don't hesitate to angel' your blade slightly outward from the body of the die and then make another pass I rotate the die 90 degrees and cut from the same angle if there's any excess currently remaining but remember to not overdo it we're also going to sand these so the cuts don't need to be perfect they just need to get it down to the point where you don't risk snapping or breaking the corner during sanding after one to two passes of the exacto knife on each corner you get something that looks similar to this about flush if not just slightly raised from the general body of the die but very scratched and it looks somewhat pressurized in a sense from the pressure of the exacto knife cutting against it now for sanding it's really just a matter of starting rough and going to finer and finer grits and then going through different polishing techniques to get the dye somewhere really impressive and this starts with just simple sandpaper I start with 320 grit sandpaper making sure to flatten it across my table sometimes I tape it down right to the table but since I was only working on four dice for this video for my main proof-of-concept I didn't bother taping it down because that was gonna add a lot of extra time hold the sandpaper under tension to make sure that it remains flat and add a little bit of water just a small splash of your fingers is about all you'll need then take the dice and start with small concentric circles moving out to larger circles for about 10 to 15 passes rotate the die 90 degrees and do the same thing again and then a personal thing I like to do is to counter rotate in the opposite direction for 10 passes just to make sure that you're not making circles and you are making random movements after that you should see that everything should just about be level and this is just the first sanding we have a lot more to go rotate the die to the next side that needs to be sanded and repeat the process now once you're finished with a 320 grit sandpaper it's time for something a little special this is micro mesh which is a brand name proprietary sandpaper grit system which uses a slightly different grit rating they say that 1500 grit in their system is about equivalent to 400 grit of standard sandpaper now normally you'd see that number and think that you would have to go on the standard sandpaper 320 400 600 800 1000 1200 and then start at the 1500 of the micro mesh pads but if you read the instructions they say to finish to 320 grit on standard sandpaper and that there 1500 grit is about equivalent to a 400 base grit and in using this I found it saves a ton of time and you don't end up basically redoing work between 320 grit standard sandpaper and then the micro mesh system you take these small papers tape them down or hold them down the exact same way I have a little in water and then it's the same thing 10 to 15 cycles on one side rotate 90 degrees 10 to 15 cycles and then counter rotate for another 10 this these numbers are completely arbitrary by the way it's just what I do but you should find something that gives you the result that you want and saves you as much time as you can because you don't want to overdo it because then you risk throwing the die out of balance now you might be wondering because you probably looked at more than one channel when it comes to dice making why I'm using these flat small sandpaper squares for the micro mesh compared to these cushy color-coded pads these obviously appear higher quality that are made they're double-sided which gives you a little bit more surface area to work off of even though those are slightly larger I understand that this looks a little cheaper than this the reason is because these have a bit of a give to them a bit of a squish that for a sharp-edged dice could result in a more rounded edge and if you want to preserve the sharpest of sharp edges with your dice these pads don't really work if you're doing your rounded edge dice they're totally fine but the price between both options is pretty much comparable so it really matters and finding the best tool for the dice that you want to make and sticking with that as always I have amazon links down in the description so you can get the tools that I'm featuring here in the video for yourself and really now it's just more of the same repeat what you've done with each individual micro mesh paper from 1,500 to 1,800 to 2,400 to 2832 all the way up to the 12,000 the only thing I do is for the last two grits of micro mesh I don't add water these papers feel far too fine and I found when I added water I would get stuck and kick on the paper and with just a dry sanding for these last two it doesn't produce a lot of dust and it's instead more of just a dry polishing run there we're not done yet I like to go with plastics or flix polish right now I've been using plastics more because the Flex was giving me an odd matte effect with some of the mica powders that I was using so you take this you take a big glop of it and throw it on to a microfiber towel you use other cloths but microfiber is gonna give you the absolute best result get all of the sides not just the ones you've sanded polish the entire die this will pay off and just smear a bunch of the Polish across the entire dice being very careful with the smaller dies and on the sharp corners of your dies to not catch it in the cloth and potentially risk breaking it and then buff it off until all of the polish is off of your resin at that point you're gonna have a die that is looking amazingly shiny and something that you're gonna be proud to use on your own table or to sell online and really at the end of the day that's it it's just time and patience to turn your raw resin dice fresh out of the cast and the molds you made yourself into something that people are gonna consider getting for themselves now if you want to get something that has like the logo on the d6 sideface I will leave a link to the Blue mimic who is a 3d printing house who they do 3d printing on demand they do custom dice masters with your own font your own logo and this is not a paid sponsorship they didn't ask me to shut them out but I'm just so extremely satisfied with my masters that I wanted to show them some love as well and recommend and if you do go over there tell them that Michael from loot table sent to you and the at least they'll know that I'm showing them a bit of love but that's it that's how you make ready transparent ready-to-use dice for opaque dice like the red planet and the winter's breath sips that you can pick up on loot tables as well I still go through all of the same amount of sanding all the way up to 12,000 grit because you don't want scratches that are perceptible to the human eye and just because you can't see through the thing doesn't mean that it should be as clear and as shiny as possible plus the plastics polish just makes things really pop so it's just time effort attention to detail that's how you get a perfectly sanded dice I hope this video was useful to you if you're starting your own dice making adventure or if your dice making veteran and just wanted to pick up a new idea from a new place as always if you enjoyed this video a positive rating would be totally appreciate it you can pick up almost all of the things they make on this channel which are D&D related or at loot tables dump come there's a big sale going on and a big giveaway event for the first 20 days of the year so be sure to check that out and keep an eye out for some more projects and some more builds here on the channel thank you so much I appreciate all the support we just recently passed a hundred subscribers which is amazing considering how little this channel has actually done in the terms of producing videos and how the first six months or so were extremely slow so I just wanted to say thank you and I love and appreciate the sport so much so I hope I'm doing stuff that you all are enjoying next week is another woodworking project as we're gonna be making something to hide the secrets of the person running the game until next time I'm Michael I like to make stuff and I'll see you around

Channel: Michael Makes

Views: 59,162

Keywords: casting dice, D&D dice, making dice, polyhedral dice, making resin dice, molding dice, making D&D dice, custom D&D dice, silicone molding, silicone mold making, resin die making, resin dice, pressure pot, resin casting, clear resin casting, pressure resin casting, vacuum chamber, epoxy resin, sanding dice, finishing dice, sanding resin, resin finishing

Id: OKyriaX3CDQ

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2020