by kleinbl00

Yeah so from a PR standpoint this is "ZOMG DICE FROM HUMAN BONEZ GAMERZ ARE TEH NUTZ".

however

Artisan Dice was born in June 2012 on Kickstarter as a way for a guy named Charlie to buy himself a Tormach. 'cuz hey - platonic solids out of aluminum? That's pretty much basicbitch Machining 101, shouldn't be any problem, right? Tormach sure thinks it's cool.

With no real machine experience, Brumfield immediately found a learning curve when it came to things like speeds and feeds. “When we started out, I would destroy an end mill every five or six titanium D20s we made. Now, we can run one end mill a week – week and a half – running eight hours on these machines. “ Once he figured out how to cut and hold 20-sided dice, he looked to making his small shop more production oriented. “A big thing for us was once we figured out how to make these things, was how do we get fast? One of the challenges after doing the Kickstarter was figuring out how to be a production shop, because we weren’t at the time. That was our biggest learning curve.”

Note that titanium dice are still in their shop but you can't order them. This is likely due to the fact that a Tormach will barely hold two thousandths with aluminum, and even "chemically pure" titanium (the stuff most jewelry is made out of - since you don't need the strength you go with the unalloyed stuff which mills like steel only stickier) requires more rigidity than you get out of a 3/4ton mill.

Note also that deciding you're going to mill dice for a living before you know how to mill dice for a living does not do wonders for your reputation. Thus are you left making the same shitty poured-resin bullshit dice as every other wanker out there (some of us have been forced to learn things about resin) only with the added overhead of a couple semi-worthless CNC machines (Artisan Dice claims they have $400k in equipment, which I have no idea how they came up with that number).

So instead you start making dice out of WTFEver you can find. And since there are only so many people willing to pay $43 for a single d20 made of moose poop, it isn't too long until you're carving up old school skeletons because you can't actually do any work with the machines you bought.

This cautionary tale is brought to me by me, who has compiled a chart of what machines are capable of holding what tolerances that illustrated exactly why Tormachs are a waste of money.