I decided to try a new dice shaker for my backgammon games, instead of doing ovals, I decided to do round using the lathe. The blanks start as square stock, not necessarily square or smooth. These can be rough blanks, the only limit is the blanks has to be no less than 1 7/8″ square. I cut them about 3/4″ longer than needed for the final product, that reason will be shown later on. Your size and blanks can be whatever you choose, there aren’t really any specific sizes that I know of unless you’re making a tournament level board.
This first video is taking a blank from square stock to round using a roughing gouge and trimming one end square with a parting tool. The lathe speed I’m running is fairly fast, no need to waste time with a slow speed cut.
After cutting all the initial blanks (I make a bunch of the same thing in two species of wood while I’m set up) the next thing is to take the rounds and cut the hollow inside for the dice shaker. I use a 1 3/8″ forstner bit for this operation. There are many makers of these bits, I am using one from Frued which seems to have a longer life before needing sharpened. The lathe needs to be running at a slow speed for this operation or overheating of the bit will occur. As shown in the video, I slow the lathe speed down quite a bit.
While in this set up, sanding the inside and touching up the outside of the dice shaker is the last item before we cut the shaker loose from the scrap base.
Once the cups are through this step, the last one is to turn the cup around, gripping from the inside and trim the bottom, removing the small leftover nub from the cutoff tool, and sanding the bottom smooth. This finishes the dice cup. All of these operations are found in making other things on a lathe. It takes me about 10 minutes total to make one cup, making the 50+ cups this round ran into a few hours, but they all went quite fast as I only had to change lathe set up two times.
Something some may ask is why I didn’t use a dead center to true the free end of the blank, I find that even using a center, the blank isn’t as true as I’d like, so I center them by eye using a small hammer to adjust for true. Practice doing this makes it look very easy.