Tungsten Dragon Dice
Heavy, Strong, Durable.
These Tungsten Carbide Dice destroy tables as well as NPCs
Space Age Metal
Tungsten comes from Swedish, tung sten which literally translates as heavy stone.
Tungsten is also known as wolfram named for the ore, wolframite, in which it is found.
Scheele, aptly named heavy rock in Swedish, is called Tungsten around the world.
On the other hand we have Germany, which quite logically insists on calling it wolfram since it is found in the mineral wolframite.
To appease the German is perfectly logical, tungsten is the symbol of the element W, and the rest of the world just ignores the fact they insist on calling it by the wrong name.
This is the hardest dice we make.
Tungsten Carbide is extremely difficult to machine and chew our tools carelessly because it is made of the same material as our tools.
Nothing feels like stopping the dice.
They are the heaviest dice ever made and after taking one of these, nothing seems right.
These dice seem to have an extra presence for that fact.
Science and Lasers Oh My!
Unlike other metal dice on the market, Dragon’s Breath Dice receive their numbers at the end of the crafting process.
They are carved with a laser ablation process.
Which is a good way to say that we blast the surface with 1.21 gigawatts of laser beam amazing sauce that vaporizes Tungsten Carbide into constituent components leaving behind a number of ultra polished recessed several thousand inches deep.
This process leaves the perfect balance of the underlying platonic solid completely intact, unlike the machine far number deeply recessed.
Sinter and Poland
Tungsten, has the highest melting point of any metal at 6,170 degrees F.
When the sun’s surface is hot enough, the sun won’t start boiling tungsten because the surface temperature is 1000 degrees cooler than tungsten’s boiling point, meaning liquid tungsten can flow on the sun’s surface. , a place where all other metals will be vaporized into nothing.
Refinement of Tungsten
Tungsten can not be refined like other metals, since you know, that all heat from the surface of the sun.
But Tungsten is extracted from the ore by a long chemical process that you read about here.
Suffice it to say that the process produces some stunningly vibrant oxides that can then be broken down into pure tungsten powder.
Pure tungsten that is ready for dice life just yet.
No, we don’t use the metallic form of Tungsten, we make these dice from an incredibly hard ceramic called Tungsten Carbide.
Carbide though is usually mixed with cobalt through a process called sintering.
Sintering occurs below the melting temperature of the base metal in this case, tungsten.
For our purposes though we use nickel as it gives us the ability to take more polish and less reactive with skin allergies.
It’s all we can dream of in ultra heavy dice.
Super hard surface for durability and long lasting polish.
(Seriously, this stuff is almost diamond-like coming in at a mind-boggling 9.5 out of 10 on the mohs scale.) It’s super hard not to crack or chip like pure tungsten.
That gives us an extra kick in the colors that we can achieve with Dragon’s Breath Finish.
Dragon’s Breath Complete
Like all of our metal dice, our Tungsten Dragon’s Dice receive the signature Dragon’s Breath Finish.
This is a hot anodizing process that is applied by hand to each die.
The craftsman’s skill here is shown in the bright colors that are unique to each die.
This color will be a color pattern from golden bronze, through deep purple, to royal and sky blue.
How can we achieve a vibrant color palette?
Our Dragon Breath process involves a very intense flame, over 3,700 degrees Fahrenheit.
In this blast of pure draconic rage, the base metal undergoes a surface transformation by reaction with atmospheric oxygen.
This reaction forms a *not quite* crystal clear oxide layer that gives us the radical greens, turquoises, and purples that this cube knows.
But how does a clear *not enough* layer of tungsten oxide crystals create this beautiful color?!?!
Through the magic of soap bubbles and the beauty of tungsten oxide crystals.
Soap bubbles are made of a very thin film…
Like the soap bubbles above, light can pass through and reflect off the surface of the clear crystal layer formed by the Dragon’s Breath process.
This happens at the molecular level meaning that the difference between the reflective surface of the crystalline layer and base titanium is only nanometers.
This happens to coincide with the wavelength of light.
Using this interference in the reflected light we can control the perceived color of the die just by controlling how thick we allow the outer layer of titanium crystals to grow.
In this case our crystal layer is not exactly clear…
While it is true that we get a large color change from Thin Film Interference, in the case of tungsten, we also get the additional effect of a clear saturation of tungsten oxide that cannot be explained with colors from bright yellow to blue and brown. purple as you can see above.
Using a combination of two net effects we epic green and purples appear in this dice.
If you want to read more about the crazy colors of tungsten oxide, check out this great research paper.
Types of Dice
Tungsten Dragon’s Dice amount