A Prototype Deck Vault With Accessory Compartment

This design actually predates the gaming accessory box I posted earlier. It was intended for card games that use dice and tokens, like MtG. It would in theory work for games like Warmachine, but I think the accessory compartment is a little small as Warmachine requires rather a lot of tokens.

It is of course a double-topped design. I engraved a hand of cards on one lid and a dice on the other, to mark the different compartments. The accessory compartment is designed to be large enough for 16mm dice.

This was a prototype; you can see that I used dogbones for the box joints. For a "production" piece I would manually cut the pockets square so there won't be any holes. You can see that the resin inlays in the engravings did not come out very well; I've improved my technique since then, although I still need more practice.

I was using metal powder in two-part epoxy resin; despite my efforts to seal the wood first, some of the resin still seeped into the wood and dropped below the surface. Funnily enough those are the parts that look better; I mixed GSW metal powder into the resin, and it looks pretty good most places where the surface was not disturbed, but not where I sanded the resin flush with the wood, even after polishing with a dremel polishing bit and compound. I also tried to mix alcohol ink into the resin on the card deck symbol, to try to progressively change the colours of the cards, but that didn't quite turn out the way I had hoped. Since then I have obtained some coloured mica powders that seem to give better results.

One issue I'm having is splintering around the lid grooves. This might be partly caused by the quality of the plywood, but it is a bit of a delicate area. For this box I applied superglue to the tongues and grooves of the lids to try to strengthen them and prevent splintering (followed by some sanding to adjust the fit), and you can see where some of that glue got away from me and spread out across the surface. The box was not varnished; hopefully varnish will work to strengthen the tongues and grooves, removing the need for superglue.

I've been planning to take these to the local gaming spot and see if people are interested in having their own boxes customized with their own engraving etc, however I really want to make the final boxes from nice wood, not plywood, and that's surprisingly hard to get around here in appropriately sized sheets - at least with my current budget.