This Video Shows the steps needed to dye any plastic or rubber parts you may want to change color. We used: Acetone Rit Dyemore synthetic fiber dye Stainless steel bowl Thermometer Electric stove
Had the same experience when we tried to dye the red vex gears. Compared with the green gears the red ones looked slightly purple. The 84s were especially tough to dye
OK VEX teams, please please please do not do this in your parent's kitchen! If you want to risk an acetone explosion and dying a kitchen with permanent black dots, wait until you buy your own house to ruin and you have your own health insurance to pay for your emergency room visit. Do this outside in the grass on an old chair with an electric hotplate (old coffeemaker or the like) and NOT on an open flame gas burner. Acetone is highly flammable. It evaporates at room temp but the heating source makes it rapidly boil off. This is why you have to add more after you do another batch of parts - it all boils off. There will be a lot of flammable vapor - another reason you need to do this outside. Please wear safety goggles or a full shield facemask so at least your eyes don't get burned out if something does go wrong. You need to control the temp so the mixture (mainly the water) doesn't boil over out of control. You can easily do this with a double boiler setup - put water in a pot and heat that directly, then put another pot in the boiling water with the dye. Doing this, your dye mix won't get over 200 degrees and the water in the mix itself will never boil (the acetone will boil but not the water). Make sure your pots are twice as deep as your solution so there is no chance of boilover. Boilovers can cause ignition of the acetone. When you add more acetone/water mix, it will rapidly boil/foam up multiple inches above the existing solution. You should be very afraid if a boilover happens - run away and disconnect the power to the hotplate. You can use stainless steel pots and tongs, the dye will not stain them. Although your mom will probably get upset if you try to use her expensive Caphalon pots. Look at the Rit Dye bottle in the video and buy the Dye More version. This is a synthetic dye. Regular Rit dye will not work. We mixed about 4 oz of dye and 4 of acetone in 8oz of water to start out, then added more acetone/water (50:50 mix) with the 2nd and 3rd batch of gears. Green gears dye within minutes, but red gears take 10 to 15 mins. We left the red gears in the bottom and just cycled the green gears in/out and pulled the red gears out last. Lay the dyed gears out on an old towel and let them dry overnight. Then the next day wash the gears with soap, water, and a toothbrush to clean off any non-absorbed latent dye so you won't dye your hands handing them. Good luck!
How did you get the light blue color on those gears at the start of the video? The teeth still look green so I'm wondering if you just put masking tape around the teeth and spraypainted the center or if there is a reliable way to get that color with dye. Thanks!
if we were to dye omnis, would you suggest to just dye the whole wheel and have the color run out of the rollers. or remove the rollers and just dye the hub
