Project Grayskull part 4 - towers and teeth!

TLDR: A continuation of my project: turning Castle Grayskull into a GM screen. Earlier posts: Project Grayskull Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. 

With the exterior painted it was time to tackle some engineering. Technical building isn't really my strong suit, but I can be as handy as I need to be most of the time. First I tackled the shelves using some pegboard I had around. I cut them out with a sabre saw and decided they were too thin, so I cut out two more in the same shapes and glued them together. It would have been easier, perhaps, to go get some nicer wood of the correct thickness, but I just wanted to keep moving forward. Also it's good to use up stuff and not spend money!

Since the shelves and the dice tower kind of came together at the same time, I'm going to show the piece I used for the top half of the dice tower first. It's obviously some kind of piece for joining misaligned PVC pipes. I figured the corrugated sides and the bends I planned to put into it would work for tumbling the dice, no "baffles" necessary inside. I painted the piece gray so that it looked more in-keeping with the build. The following pictures show it in place, with the two shelves (unpainted and then painted). Note the cut-outs to secure the top and bottom of the dice tower/slide. 

 

My original idea for the bottom end of the dice tower was for the dice to free-fall into a self-standing elbow piece that would shoot them out of the mouth. I used a black piece of PVC and globbed up the end with hot glue, then painted it a flesh pink just to be fun/gross. Here it is. Don't get too attached though, because it's going away.

Note the view of the inside of the drawbridge in these photos. It's still just green plastic. I'll get to that below. But first, a slo-mo video of me testing out the dice tower. Please turn your sound on so you can hear the clunky tumbling of dice in slow-mo. Also note how the bottom end of the dice tower wobbles. 

Basically, I gave up on self-standing elbow because of my dissatisfaction with its instability. Also the gloopy-throat look was just too much and I didn't care for the "inelegance" of a two-piece solution. Plan B involved something subtler, something that was firmly hung instead of just sitting in place, and (bonus) a separate hidden dice input for the GM!

Here is the plan A and plan B pieces side-by-side. Sharp eyes will catch the LED light tape, remote, and USB power bank in the background. That comes later. The black-pipe solution on the right is the new plan. I hot-glued the top of it to the shelf as pictured below. It works great, by the way, and is very sturdy. I keep forgetting little things I did in the process because all of this work was completed over a year ago. I put some craft foam in the bottom of the castle as a kind of flooring. But then I ended up cutting away some of it and painting the space below the dice tower bottom all black so that it looked better from the outside when open. Looking at this makes me a little nauseous that I didn't go with black on the upper part of the tube and the shelf too. But ... "perfect is the enemy of done."

And here is what the top of the dice tower looks like from the front, with the case closed. In a later stage I add a backing piece behind the tower to hide the interior. The goal here is for players to be able to reach up and throw dice in the tower. The GM can use the top or the secret side input from behind the screen. 

Ok. Now for something fun. The inside of that drawbridge/gate/door thing. I used moldable plastic to create teeth. You just dump the pellets into a mug of boiling water and they become malleable for a few minutes. I bought this stuff, Polly Plastics, through Amazon. The front tooth and near-jaw molars were molded just a few seconds before the picture was taken. The molars along the far side (near the container) are cooling into a cloudy white. When fully cool, the plastic is white and hard, as seen in the following picture.

The plastic is a bit waxy and smooth at first, and it takes a good coat of primer before it will take paint well. Sanding it would probably be smart. Oh! I almost forgot, why even do this? Well, otherwise the dice would roll right off the edge of the gate. Note that in the dice video above I placed a bit of pipe-strap in a U shape around the tongue to get an idea of how high the dice "dam" needed to be. Even now the dice don't always lay flat on the tongue. I'm considering a bit of clear resin poured on the tongue to make it look wet and to also make it flat. Finally, I ended up putting a spot of craft foam inside the bottom bend of the black PVC to slow the dice down just a little. I mean, they really come flying out!

Here it is finished and painted. No comments from anyone who understands teeth please. I clearly don't, but I think it works, visually. I tried to roughly match the upper chompers, which look gorilla like to me. Here's a front and side view.

That was a lot to absorb, so we'll leave it there for now. Next up "finishing steps?"