D4 Silicone Mold (Food Safe)

For this project I made a food safe silicone mold using a 3D designed and printed 4D.

-Fusion360

-3D Printer

-2 Part Food Safe Silicone

A to-scale D4 felt like a good option to make a novelty food mold. I wouldn't necessarily include these in any actual table top gaming scenario but they're definitely a cute thing to recreate in multiples for something like a novelty ice tray or resin/acrylic to make custom dice. It was also helpful that this form has built in positive draft angles(when placed upside down) to make taking the 3D printed die out of the mold, this is something that I'll definitely have to consider if I re-create this project with other dice to ensure it's viable for demolding.

Tetrahedron

The design for the tetrahedron was very simple; I determined that to ensure the height of the die was standard to other dice, I could make a construction square the same size as my size limitation and work on that mini-plane. I created an equilateral triangle on the top plane and on the front plane a right triangle starting at the midpoint of the base triangle to any one of the points of the same triangle and the height as my final desired height, 17mm (in the pictured below my original triangle was the wrong size so I just scaled it down) I then used the loft tool which finished off the form.

Numbered Faces

For the numbered faces I sketched the below form and put numbers down while rotating as needed using an actual D4 as a reference. The bottom numbers were rotated 120° and -120°. Fusion has the ability to use custom fonts but I opted for the default Ariel they have available.

Printing + Processing

Due to a printing error there were some superficial imperfections on the final form but I used a file to smooth it out.

The first step in the process was using gorilla glue to adhere the form to the base of the water tight container. After it dried and the rest of the container was set I poured in a 2 part food safe silicone mixture, ensuring that there was 2cm of silicone past the height of the form. After a full day of setting I deconstructed the mold from the form and container leaving the components pictured in this step. (yes while I did need to sacrifice one of the numbered faces, due to the nature of a D4 determining which number is there can be determined by the other faces, I also was able to use the side with the imperfections as the base.)

Using melted tempered chocolate I filled the new mold and after an hour or so in a cooler I had a chocolate 4D.