Make: iPhone Dice Tower

iPhone 3G box - nicely sized for use
as a dice tower or dice box

Prepare to decouple

Decoupled!

Ready to nest

Nested and ready for action!!

Okay, so it's not a dice tower made out of actual iphones, rather just the extremely sturdy boxy it came in.  I stumbled on this instructable the other day and knocked this out in a lull between olympic events last night.   

My iphone 3G got stolen a couple of years ago and I still had the box, so i decided to put the box to good use.  The 3G box is considerably larger than either the 3GS or the iphone 4 boxes (as used in the instructable) and makes a more practicle dice tower and also doubles as a capacious dice box. 

I followed the general guide in the instructable, but as I wasn't using exactly the same box, I needed to fiddle with the dimensions of the opening hole.  I also elected to just go with one baffle which throws the dice forwards onto the cradle and then down onto the 45 degree baffle at the bottom.  I think that the second baffle's job is to slow down the dice, lessening bounce-out, so I would reccommend that you stick with the instructable and put 2 baffles in if you try this yourself. 

After construction I discovered that my hand was just a bit too podgy to comfortably retrieve the dice and the visibility from an observers point of view was also quite poor.

It was a trivial matter to trim the edges of the lid at a angle to rectify this whilst maintaining its function as a lid.  I also discovered during modification that there is enough material in the off-cuts to make your baffles.  It is entirely possible to construct the dice tower solely from the contents of the iphone box with no need to resort to scraps of foam board.  Of course you will still need the glue to hold the whole thing together.


The other advantage of the using an iphone 3G box is that it comes with foam pre-glued into the lid already, which dramtically reduces the chance of dice bouncing out.