@Sylvie and @Xenon27 seems to have mastered the ability to dye vex plastic parts. I pulled together the pictures that I could find to make it easier for people to search for and find.
The dye process is shown here in this video How To Dye Plastic Parts | Vex Robotics 60470S Semicolon - YouTube
Very important, you 100% NEED the dye for synthetics (Rit DyeMore). Graphite is the name of the color. The normal fabric dye does not work.
Besides for black, what other target colors are reasonable, especially for the green (now red) gears? Would going to a lighter color (yellow or pink) be possible?
as far as I’m aware, you won’t be able to achieve lighter colors, especially not colors which are lighter than the starting color. Black is obviously the easiest color to dye. I’ve seen dark blues and purples achieved as well, using a very dark blue on the red plastic would probably yield some sort of purple, and using dark blue on green gears would probably look mostly just blue.
if you wanted to get brighter colors, one way might be to first dye the gears black, and then paint the sides of the gear the desired color. I don’t think painting the teeth is a good idea, but by dying the whole thing black first, having black teeth would probably look decent with any other color on the sides.
None that I’ve found. You can’t get the red or green out, I tried multiple ways.
You can get purple-ish if you use blue dye, but the amount of purple depends on how long you dye it for, so it’s inconsistent.
You could probably go orange with yellow dye, but since yellow is lighter I have doubts.
There is no making them lighter.
How hot do you need to get it? Boiling? Just under boiling? Enough to cook a steak in water and it be edible?
My team was hoping to be able to get gears and chains dyed to these color:
From what I have read, this wouldn’t be possible to do. How would you recommend getting the lightest blue and lightest orange possible for gears and chains?
Just under boiling.
You could try yellow dye for the orange, but blue is going to be very hard.
ok, so just enough to cook a steak to edible.
Edited: the original was to be a DM, I’m new to this software.
no. toss it with no seasoning straight into the almost boiling water. you can do that though
And I assume we would be best dying red gears yellow for orange and green gears blue for blue. ANd I assume you could only get the chain to be a dark blue.
Yes, that sounds about right. Green gears are gonna go a really ugly dark teal though.
@Foster to disambiguate Rit Dye from the Rochester Institute of Technology, could you update the title to the proper capitalization of “Rit”? It’s not an acronym.
On a serious note, here is the experience I have had with dyeing parts.
Green 3.25" omnis dye very well, and the dye has not rubbed out of the rollers after several hours of driving.
The dye of the OLD 4" omni wheel’s rollers rubs out very quickly.
For omni wheels, avoid going above 190 °F when boiling. This will warp the housing and make the drive unstable (2 omni wheels went to waste because of this).
The HS V2 gears take a long time to dye, much longer than the original HS gears.
The dye is only on the surface of the plastic. Make sure you cut/sand the part first, then dye. Doing this the other way around will result in uneven coloring. However, if you like this look, then feel free to do it the other way.
The best advice I could give? Don’t crank up the temperature while waiting for the parts to dye. They take time, and cranking up the heat risks melting your expensive VEX parts.
One more thing: if you dye a disc, keep in mind the dye rubs off extremely easily. A quarter of our yellow discs have streaks of grey due to touching this single dyed disc.
Planning dyeing some parts this afternoon and had a quick question. In order to dye this gear, would we have to take all the screws and nuts off or could we dye it with the stuff on and just have the spots covered by the screws not dyed?
Nah just dunk it in. All visible plastic will be dyed about 2mm down.
The metal pieces will have a thin film of dye on them, but it washes off super easily. It leaves just the dyed gear and uncolored screws + nuts.
The nylon part of the nylocks might turn whatever color you’re dying them, just a heads up.
Are the roller still dyed or did it wear off?
Still on. They look the same exact shade as when they were originally dyed.
