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Make a Dice Drum.
Make a Dice Drum
If like me you get fed up of everyone rolling tons of dice over your wargames table and knocking over figures, rolling off the table or landing on terrain so that you cannot tell what number is showing, then this is probably the best use of ten minutes of your time that you will ever use. Quite simply it puts an end to all of that and makes a cool drumming noise as you use it. All you need are a pair of scissors, some glue, a piece of thin card, one used 2 inch tape roll and 5 minutes of your time.
The ingredients
First you need to apply the glue to the one edge of the roll and press down the card until firmly in place, then after a minute or so cut around until all the excess card has gone. At this stage you have a fully functional dice drum, once the glue has set properly.
The Dice Drum
Now, if you want to make it all fancy you can either paint on (very messy) or glue on (easy option) a design that you like. For the easy option I would suggest either a design or photo that you like (loads available on the internet) that you simply resize in paint or any similar photo manipulation package and print off the image making sure that it is slightly bigger that the dice drum, so an image of about 2.5 x 11 inches would be fine. Once printed out simply cut around the image.
The design glued on
Get your glue stick and apply glue to the outside of the dice drum, work quickly and make sure that it is completely covered. Then apply the design and once happy that it is pretty straight smooth it down until your design starts to overlap itself, at this point you have to apply the glue stick to the back of your design and smooth that down so that you have an invisible join.
Great scores yet again
Finally all you need to do is trim off the excess design and your dice drum looks great and ready to impress, not to mention saving you a lot of bother with dice rolls. Now all you need to do with your dice drum to use it properly is to put in the amount of dice that you need to roll (I use 12mm dice and my Dice Drum can manage approx 20 or so quite easily) into it, then cup your hand over the top of the Dice Drum and shake it well. After a good shaking simply put the Dice Drum down so that all can see and remove your hand to show the scores you have on the dice. If you get really good you can even shake your dice in your hand and throw them into the Dice Drum (only do this if you are very experienced and have a good aim), but in fairness you cannot beat the first method because of the drumming noise it makes, which in fairness can be either really addictive or really irritating depending upon circumstances and who exactly is shaking the Dice Drum.