Cyanight's Customizations

@LebaneseWarlord said in Need advice for custom dice DIY:

I’ve recently bought 96 dice because I wanted to make custom hit/miss dice for Global 40. I bought these dice from amazon and they’re plain blank and white dice.

I don’t have a lot of experience with DIY projects but I have access to a lot of good tools so I’m looking for advice regarding techniques on how to mark and repaint the dice I bought.

For the marking, I was thinking about using a rotary tool to carve a little dot.

The real challenge is the painting. I looked a lot on internet and I can’t seem to find a technique for painting on plastic that everyone agrees on, but here’s what I have so far.

Wash the dice to remove any grease that could be on the surface Use very fine sandpaper or some sort of abrasive to remove the protective finish that is on the dice right now and offer a better surface for the new paint to stick Wash the dice again the remove the dust from the paint removal Apply one or a few (I’m not sure about this one, I’ll read what is suggested on the can) of primer Apply a few thin layer of the color I want on the dice Paint a white dot in the carving I made earlier with a fine brush Apply one or a few (not sure about this one either, something will be suggested on the can) of clear finish to protect the paint

Any correction or suggestion would be very welcome!

Guys use RIT dye for color. Go to Siredblood’s custom dice you tube video. Shows how he used a jig to spot hole dice and then dye them

I could help with financing?

Dice would have either land or naval with a separate category of Air because that branch overlaps both

Symbols for land: ( green) 6 dice in set
Infantry x 1
Armour x1
Mech x1
Artillery x2
Blank x1

Symbols for Naval: ( blue) 6 dice in set

Battleship x1
Cruiser x1
Destroyer x1
Submarine x2
Blank x1

Symbols for Air: (white) 6 dice in set

Fighter x2
Fighter-Bomber x2
Strategic Bomber x 2

@fasthard thanks for sharing! Interesting idea to use 2 euro cent coins.

I’ve gotten several private messages and some responses in this thread… so just as a head’s up and a community service…

Because of the private messages, I have ALREADY made a deal to unload my custom units, and they are, in-fact, already mailed off.

I know its kinda pointless now, but if you’re still that curious as to what I did have, here’s the complete list of the custom HBG units I had purchased in the last few weeks to beef up my bins… since I later made a decision to pull them and not use them, I did eventually re-order equivalent numbers of default/original OOB A&A units from HBG to beef up my numbers (like if I didn’t like the two HBG Japanese Fuso battleships, I reordered two OOB Kongo or Yamato battleships to replace them… so-on and so-on.  Anyways, here’s the (now kinda pointless) list:

(BTW: you may notice that for the most part, planes are missing from this list… I found most custom HBG aircraft to be good enough and scaled well enough to survive my “off-scale axe”.  So there are many HBG planes like P-47s and F4F/Hellcats that survived the cut and made it into my permanent bins)

HBG Battle Pieces (custom units)

US - Olive Drab:
5x Pershing Tanks
5x M5 Stuart tanks
15x M4A3 Sherman tanks
5x P-51 fighters

5x Essex CVs
5x South Dakota BBs
2x Nevada BBs
5x Baltimore CAs

UK - Tan:
10x Churchill Tanks
10x Valentine Tanks

5x Ark Royal CVs
3x King George V BBs

Russia - Brown
2x KV-2 tanks
11x T-34 tanks
4x T-26 tanks

German - Black
2x Schleswig Holstein BBs
2x Seydlitz CVs
8x Pz-III tanks

Japan - Pumpkin Orange:
10x Type 97 tanks
5x Ki-43 fighters
2x G8N Rita bombers

2x Kaga CVs
2x Ryujo CVs
5x Nagato BBs
2x Fuso BBs
5x Mogami cruisers
5x I-400 subs

MyHBGrejects.jpg

@cyanight:

Everyone has their own unique way of painting the pieces.  No matter how we paint the pieces they must still be playable within the game.

And the nice difference between game sculpts and real military equipment is that sculpts are rarely lost or damaged in combat.  If that wasn’t the case, people might actually hesitate to risk sending their painted sculpts into battle on the game map, given the large amount of time they’ve spent on customizing them.  :-)

So very true. When I first started painting my aircraft I had to include decal roundels for the players to distinguish the pieces from one another. My naval units are painted mostly with a color scheme for playability except for the capital ships like the Carriers and popular Battleships. All of them have a decal or flag to show which nation they belong too. I actually replaced the OOB British Cruisers because I thought they looked too close in size with the destroyers. I ended up replacing with some ships I found on Shapeways. The biggest problem I had with naval units is that they can exist in the same seazone with enemy pieces unlike land territories. Because of this I decided to keep the subs, destroyers, cruisers and non unique battleships following a color scheme. There are so many colors in the spectrum though we should be able to come up with a solution that will make them look more historical yet keep the pattern or color scheme for the nation. I really would love to paint all the ships historically and maybe I will revisit them again someday. Every time I go back and repaint my pieces I seem to get better at it. Or at least I think I do, hehe.

Pretty ingenious, definitely food for thought since it gives us options for future modifications. Nice job.

@BluGerman:

today i managed to read through this year long forum thread and I have to ask what happened after November 17th 2011?.. did everybody in this forum mysteriously dissapear? or was it just discontinued? or was it moved to another forum thread or something?.. somebody please let me know because I was really excited to see Allworks whole board with his miniatures (they are awesome!)

In answer to your question- I don’t really know.  :? Allworkandnoclay is an artist who does all sorts of other work for money, not just Axis and Allies. I presume that he moved on to other work, as his Flickr account shows him doing some sculpting and what not. To be honest though, he stopped posting pics, people stopped commenting, and it sort of fell of the face of the earth. There’s some stuff on TallPaul’s page, and there are plenty of other artists with some awesome stuff if you need your daily fix of painted minis!