❖ Version History ❖

February – April, 2025
Hello and welcome to the third & final slice in our 3d printing process behind the 4-sided dice design & manufacturing!

In the recent posts, we had been discussing the dreadful quoting procedure for getting the dice made professionally, giving up on that process, deciding that we were going to manufacture the dice ourselves & following through with purchasing a super fancy new 3d printer.

Now we are going to talk about the progress behind the bulk batch production & some of the pitfalls that we have had to overcome. It is not always roses and daisies back here making things from scratch (though we do take great pride in trying to simplify the procedure for our viewers!). There are in fact several problems that we have had to tackle in the use of the BambuLab x1c printer setup, but rather than give up we are here to share the experience (and hopefully help some of you learn a thing or two about your own printer along the way!).

To get things started on today’s talk, let’s start by going over what you are looking at in the featured picture up above. In that shot, you can see my using some clippers to take little plastic walls off of the side of our dice. This material that is being removed is known as “scaffolding”. The reason it is included in our 3d printing design for the dice is simple: to keep the shape as perfectly pyramidal as we can.

One interesting (and unfortunately risky) decision that I made in the design of the dice is that the x4-corners of the dice would be suspended from the base of the dice with a little cylinder holding them in place to the base. This aspect of the shape makes the dice really unique looking, but also does a great job of highlighting the different colors that we used & hope to feature when rolling the dice.

For the three corners of this dice that are touching the printer floor while being produced, there is no concern for their stability, as, they are literally resting on the floor. But. For that little white tip at the top of the top of the dice, this is a little bit of a different story. This single shape is suspended above the surface of the rest of the dice. And, as you might imagine, since there are big overhangs on this small piece of plastic, it naturally begins to sag while being printed! It is for this reason that we need to provide a special surface for this little white pyramid to rest on while it is being made, hence: scaffolding.

When the printing process is completed, the scaffolding is pleasantly easy to remove. Just take a pair of clippers, get under the surface of the scaffold walls, and pull it away from the base. It literally clips off like the shell of a pistachio (and luckily for me I need to do this approximately 2,000 times just to bring Royal Threadcount to life this year, hooray!).

However, there is a bit of a problem. After the scaffolding is removed from the surface of the dice, it unfortunately leaves a bit of scarring on the surface of the plastic (one part from where the scaffolds attach, and a bit from the actual clipping process as well). This leaves us with dice that look like this:

Well, we have an obvious issue… but not so much an obvious solution. There are many ways that we can tackle how to solve this problem, and it is all about the engineering behind the process. Here is the order of events that I went through to try and troubleshoot the problem:

1. Better Scaffolding
Duh. Let’s just go back to the drawing board and see if we can’t design something a bit better for the scaffolding process in the design. Unfortunately this is… harder said than done.. and not necessarily saving us time or effort. Problem #1 here: designing new scaffolding (or rather custom scaffolding) requires us to go back to the original design & build better supports into the actual 3d model. This can work, but it complicates things in a big bad way when it comes to the actual coloring & printing process. Problem #2: No matter what kind of scaffolding I design, there is going to be marks left behind, and it might ironically be beneficial to leave the marks on the walls, because this might work out to being an easier piece of the puzzle to solve in the end!

2. Sandpaper?
Less Duh. I had actually never even though about the idea of using sandpaper to alter the design of a 3d-printed model. I came across this solution while talking to some of my other crafty friends about the rough designs, and then I proceeded to research other people trying it our with their prints. It seemed like a solution that might be applicable to what we need? (but I was also immediately apprehensive about the objective here, as, once again, I must make several thousand of these dice in the grand scheme of things). Honestly though, it seemed like it might be worth a shot… If for nothing else, this would be a good bit of learning for other future projects too! ~ Luckily I’ll save you the hassle. This is a non-functional solution (at least for what I need). The sandpaper actually does some great work at removing the ‘texture’ from the walls that have been clipped, but it does a pretty substantial amount of damage to the dice (and makes it comically sharp). The most important thing to know about this (and maybe this is actually big help for you?) is that the sandpaper removes the layer lines from the print. The great news is that it makes 3d printed surfaces incredibly smooth, the bad news is that they no longer have symmetrical textures & the walls are noticibly scratched from the surface of the sand paper.

3. Annealing.
This… was a wild and crazy accident, and a bit of a scientific miracle of conversation. I have a coworker who is also interested in 3d-printing techniques, and he is especially interested in the idea of electroplating his prints. He had been talking to me about how this would require him to make a solution that he could get the metal to adhere to the plastic surfaces & then be smoothed out by a process known as annealing (or in layman’s terms, heating/cooling the surface to increase strength). While he was talking to me about this process, a wild idea clicked into my head… what if I could simply re-melt the surface of the 3d print after I remove the scaffolds? Would this actually solve my problem? Would it make things worse? I had no way of guessing the answer to this… and I actually did not have an idea for how I might actually accomplish this task, that is, until I sat at my desk again. Looking at my 3d-printer lab setup, I had a hypothesis…. “What if I just used the bed temperature to melt the dice back to the surface? ~ it is already a process used to keep the materials in place while printing… maybe this could work?” – worth a try:

So, of course, I fired up my Ender printer.
I wasn’t really sure where to start with this, so I set the print bed to 60 degrees to see what would happen. Turns out, this was not enough to get the dice to do what I wanted. It was at about this moment that I discovered the print bed temperature actually has a limit of 100 degrees. Concerned my idea was not going to come together at this heat level, I patiently waited for it to get up to 100 degrees and gently placed a few dice on the surface.

Much to my surprise this temperature actually worked out to be nearly perfect. It was exactly hot enough to start melting the surface of the dice again, and so long as I got the dice off of the surface in under 2 minutes or so, there was no trace of additional damage to the exterior (or strength) of the dice. What is even more amazing is that the scratches came off of the dice in a significant way… they were still there to an extent, but they are so much cleaner looking, and in many cases they were ‘healed’.

I was astonished at this result. I sincerely began to doubt whether or not it was going to have been a good decision to take on this new 3d-printing hardware & the overwhelming task of manufacturing parts for the game myself… but this moment of seeing the final dice really brought my hope back to the project!

Though the process of making these dice myself is not perfect… it is coming along very smoothly all thanks to this crazy solution! As of right now, it is about half way into March of 2025. I have about 1,000 dice successfully printed, I have performed the scaffolding removal & the print bed annealing process to about x500 of the dice thus far, and so long as we keep to this pace, we will have enough dice to publish this game by the end of April!

In the end, it is going to take about 300-500 hours of printing, and probably about 30-40 hours of post-production work on my end to craft the dice necessary to produce Royal Threadcount… and while that is in fact quite a lot of work, this is actually the part of the process that I love. I get the privilege of making these dice for you to find in your game box sometime around a year from now, I get the opportunity to make a part of this game in my house and share it with you, and I get to do all of this as part of a $5,000 discount for the Librarium Games Publishing Company because we are manufacturing it ourselves and not paying out somewhere else to handle it. This is what I live for when it comes to running a small business.

I am so grateful to still be allowed to make games for you!
But that is enough gushy stuff! Be sure to check back in some time soon to catch our next adventure in the Librarium Games Design Journal, where we will be going back into the development of our prototyping & card designs! And as always, thank you for reading!