Wanted to share one of my projects that I have been tinkering with for a while. This was the first project I tackled with my lowrider v3 that went beyond stuff like making boxes entirely on the CNC and really began to integrate the CNC as one part of a greater workflow.
I am particularly proud of this one because building it hit every single major tool in my workshop, from jointing/planing to CNCing, hand routing, lasering, 3d printing and even some chisel work. Ive sort of accidentally been speed running becoming a wood worker over the last year or so and it was fun to see all these new skills come together and make something.
Edit: Here is a quick video of the tower in action
I have always been fascinated with those cheesy fortune teller machines for some reason. I thought it would be a fun project to make a novelty dice roller based on my own fortune teller machine. The models shown here are done in wither walnut/cherry or basswood. Everything visible on the model is wood except for the battlements, lettering, dice holder and trim around the dice ports (which are FDM printed) and the goblin model. (which is resin printed) For scale reference, the models are about 8.5 inches tall.
The cabinet panels and the crown molding are cut on the lowrider. A little chisel work was done to clean up the panels and the moulding profile was added at the router table. The CNC was particularly helpful with the crown moulding because I found when drilling alignment holes by hand I just couldn’t get them accurate enough to not make super noticable errors when putting things together. One learning with this project has been that working at this small of a scale really shrinks the amount of acceptable error.
This shows my initial 3d printed prototype and some of the cut panels coming off of the CNC.
I had a lot of trouble trying to just smash the panels together with glue accurately. So eventually I designed this 3d printed internal frame you can kind of see here. It encapsulates the dice rolling mechanism, and holds captive nuts which are used to attach the panels with these brass accents screws. I thought the screws looked nice, especially on the walnut, but also it meant that repairs could be made to the model inside the cabinet since the panels would now be removable.