Forged Carbon Fiber

The classic hi-tech material, Carbon Fiber has been used in everything from modern fighter jets to Formula 1 race cars and Storm Trooper Suits (pretty sure it makes a better armor than that blaster magnetic called plastoid) Carbon Fiber was originally created in the late 1800’s by Thomas Edison for use in his newfangled incandescent light bulbs. Edison baked cotton and bamboo fibers at high heat in an oven with a controlled atmosphere devoid of oxygen using a process called pyrolysis.   These days carbon fiber is manufactured using a similar process, but instead of using cotton or bamboo as the starting material (also called the precursor) a blend of Rayon and polyacrylonitrile is used. By heating the precursor in an atmosphere devoid of oxygen, it does not burn. Instead, the precursor starts a jammin’ a Caribbean beat until all of its molecules form one crazy conga and begin to dance and shake. They party all night long until every atom has passed out and fell off the conga line, except for those Carbon atoms. They’re party animals. Carbon keeps the party rocking until somewhere around 5,500 degrees Fahrenheit. When it cools, you get a crazy strong fiber made from what is now basically pure carbon fiber. Who knew conga lines could science? In most cases those carbon fibers are then woven into a fabric and hand laid into a mold using a process very similar to laying fiber glass, only there’s a vacuum and a rather large oven at the end that is used to cure the resin impregnated fabric. The end result is a super hard shell like our friendly looking Storm Trooper helmet pictured above. The downside to all this awesome is that it’s insanely expensive. As to exactly why that is, check out this article on gizmodo. In our case, a carbon fabric would not work as we are looking for a solid dice, not just a thin light weight shell. That means we had to find a carbon fiber manufacturing process that produces a solid part.

Fear not my friends, for through some magical wizardry I don’t even pretend to comprehend, a very small number of manufactures, have begun to produce solid meaty chunks of carbon fiber. These solid billets give birth to our dice, a process that involves the slaughter of many poor unsuspecting tungsten carbide endmills. Turns out carbon fiber is stupid amounts of abrasive and it loves to eat tungsten carbide like a fat kid loves cake.

Once machined, these dice are hand sanded all the way down to a 9 micron on each face then polished on our buffing wheels to a silky smooth finish. The carbon fiber is left bare and then laser engraved, giving us that sinister black on black effect.