The Story of the Royal Mold System
In 2019, I set out to completely rethink
Ok, I know what you’re thinking… what are dice molds and why do I care? Allow me to explain.
Around that time, dicemaking as a hobby had begun to explode. Dungeons and Dragons was rapidly growing in popularity and many makers dreamed of producing their own custom dice. Sets of handmade dice were selling for upwards of $150, and everyone wanted to get in on the action. Unfortunately, the molds most people were making were low quality and they often wasted quite a bit of expensive silicone trying to get them right.
Nachtigall Enterprises took on this challenge
Here’s what most dicemakers were working with:
Molds at that time were predominantly single die molds made with craft store silicone. They were difficult to make, prone to failure, and getting the cast dice out of them was practically surgery.
I saw the consistent frustration by artists and knew there had to be a better way. Plus, the tabletop gaming industry was growing quickly and getting a foot in the door here would open many new opportunities in the future. I’d studied manufacturing in the past as part of other hobbies, so I was familiar with more industrial techniques for making molds. I ordered a set of 3D printed masters and got to work.
I took cues from the world of injection molding and professional modelmaking in the initial designs. I wanted a single slab-style mold for the whole set, as that would save over 20% in material volume and several minutes in mold prep time versus the individual cups. A two part mold also meant dead-easy demold and significantly longer mold life.
So what is the RMS?
The Royal Mold System is a compact, high-precision mold system for making gaming dice. It consists of two mold styles: The R2 and the R3. The R2 is a two part mold with a small injection port for the resin. This style minimizes post-casting cleanup but limits you on what styles you can make. The R3 is a three part mold (two sides and a lid) that gives you a full open face to pour resin in, allowing for more complex designs and inclusions.
Each mold is made of commercial-grade silicone perfectly tuned for structural stability. The mold form is modular, letting you configure it in any die order prior to manufacturing, affording complete flexibility for custom orders.
So what did it take to get to that final design?
Approximately 9 months of product development and literally hundreds of prototypes.
Yeah… the picture below is only a portion of the iterations I went through to develop all the tooling and designs. I’m quite good at rapid prototyping, so I was able to churn out several iterations of whatever I was workshopping in a very short amount of time.
The whole story of the development of the RMS is long and nerdy, so let me to catch you up on the highlights of the specific problems I encountered and how I fixed them:
Masters
Each mold needed master versions of the dice, and the common way to produce these “masters” was to 3D print, then sand and polish them. The RMS relied on a very precise fit between the dice and the modular base
While we had the 3D printing tech to do high-precision prints, by the time they were fully sanded and polished they’d be off by +/- 0.3mm, which was enough for them to not fit tightly in the mold bucks. Plus, it takes a lot of time to de-sprue, sand and polish full sets.
Instead, I tapped the machining capabilities of our manufacturing partner to make us blank dice out of brass. Brass gave us dimensional stability and mirror finishes once polished, and when molded and cast in a dimensionally-stable resin, I ended up with very high quality blanks. Those blanks were run through our laser engraving setup, and now I had nearly perfect and dimensionally accurate masters for our molds.
Mold Release
During the production process, we would need to apply spray mold release to the top of the R3 as the last step of pouring.