Creating custom dice rolling tray!

Hi everyone,

We rebuilt the Farkel dice game tray into a custom-color RPG dice tray!

Over the past few months, playing some Pathfinder home campaign sessions, we've come to really want to have one of those cool dice rolling trays.  (How else can someone be sitting comfortably on the couch and still have a nice way to roll their dice!)

With that goal in mind, we stumbled across a game at a thrift store - and starting thinking about whether or not we could make a conversion....  From the "Farkel Game Set" (which doesn't really fit with the aesthetic of RPGs) to a cool looking dice tray....

We'll outline what we came up with below.  Bottom line is that it turned out pretty well :)

Step 1:  Found the Farkel Game Set -- $1.50.  Got us the plastic pieces we needed -- and even several dice for the collection.

Here's a look at our $1.50 Farkel Game Set box.  Came with what you see here....  We didn't really like having all of that Farkel came business on our tray.  (Though it certainly would have worked!)

Step 2:  We pried the back plastic off of the rim plastic.  Turned out it was only glued at eight places (on the points of the octogon).  We found that 3-4 of these were pretty weak.  Once we had them loose, we pried the rest apart.

Here's how things looked once we pried everything apart.  We were able to get the rim plastic off of the back plastic.

Step 3:  We pried the red Farkel felt off of the back plastic piece.  It wasn't too hard to pull off.  Seemed like something kind of like wood glue or Elmer's glue which was holding it on there. 

The nice thing about the back piece is that it has black felt on the rear surface.  This helps it sit nicely on a table-top.  We left this alone :)

Here's how things looked with the felt removed -- and the two plastic pieces separated.

Step 4:  Size the new felt.  It turned out that there was an "inner lip" on the back plastic piece.  This was great because it meant that we only needed to size our new felt piece to go over that lip.  And, we didn't need to be very exact about it.  Then, the rim plastic bites on that lip -- but is glued to the outer edge of the back plastic.

[Where to get felt?  We got ours at Jo-Ann's Fabrics.  Suspect you can buy sections of felt - in pieces or by the yard in any fabrics store.]

We roughly cut the felt -- and then were ready to trace the imprint of that inner lip.

Here are the parts with our rough-cut felt piece.

Step 5:  Cutting to the outline.  We used our little clamps to hold the felt tightly to the back plastic.  Then, we traced that inner lip edge.  This gave us something to cut to.  So, we removed the clamps and cut with scissors.

 

Here's how things looked prior to cutting.  You can see the pattern we needed to cut to.  Nice and easy.

Step 6:  Test fit up.  We put all of the pieces together and had a look.  Things did fit!  We were a little bit worried because our felt was certainly thicker and more substantial than the red Farkel felt.  But, all was good.  We could press the rim piece down to where it previously bonded to the back piece.

And, we liked the colors.  The turquoise with the black rim.  We chatted a bit about what to do next.  Should we keep the colors the same (same black) -- or perhaps air brush the rim plastic another color.  In the end, we decided to stay with the high contrast black.  But, we wanted to end up with a mat finish -- and paint over the "made in...." marking.

Here is the test fit-up.  The turquoise with black looks good - and pieces fit together even with our thicker felt.

Step 7:  Paint and glue.  We used our black primer spray-paint to paint the rim piece -- and we didn't worry about the back piece.  Once this was done, we used super glue to glue the two pieces back together.

Here is our finished dice tray!

Here's how the tray ended up!  We had to re-glue a little bit of the back felt - but otherwise very solid.  We've been using it now for a month - and mission accomplished - works well on the couch!!  (By the way, as we're sure everyone who uses these knows -- it works well on a table as well!)

All finished - here's a test....  Not so surprising - it works :)