Workbench: Dyeing for a Change

There’s nothing like creating a bit of individualism with your RC kit and many will buy hop-ups to take it away from that stock look, but one easy way to change the appearance of your RC is to dye the plastic parts!
It’s a thing owners have been doing for years in their quest for style over substance and if this idea takes your fancy, here’s a guide on how to dye your plastic parts.

Starting point

When you dye anything, the final colour will depend on the original colour.  For example if you tried to dye a red item yellow, it’s more likely to end up orange!  So before you start discolouring all your plastic bits, think about this first.  In general it’s best to add a darker coloured dye to a lighter coloured product.  So florescent yellow will happily be dyed to red, blue, green, brown, black and such.

In this case:

In the case of this dyeing project, we will take some white Kyosho 17mm ST-R wheels and turn them black.  Not the most exciting colour change but there are in fact no black 17mm non offset standard Maxx sized wheels for sale in this country! So if you want black wheels on your truggy, then this is one way to get them.

Get the Dye

There’s only one major dye in the UK that will work when dying plastic products  so make sure you get the right thing.  You need Dylon dye which is sold in small aluminium tins; they look like small tins of show polish!  Don’t use any of the other dye from Dylon as they do not work.  There’s quite a variety of colours available and they can be bought from shops like Woolworths for less than £2 a tin (we only used two tins for all four wheels).

Clean and degrease

As with painting a body shell, it’s important to make sure there is no dirt or grease on the wheels to start with so wash them thoroughly with soapy water and rinse them off after although they do not need to be dried.

Prepare the dye

We don’t really need to say this part as there are instructions in with the dye which explains all, but just so you don’t get confused….  First boil up the kettle, then cut a hole in the top of the dye tin.  Put this in a glass container (if you use plastic like us, it will get dyed as well) and add one pint of boiling water then allow the dye to dissolve fully in this by giving it a good mix with a wooden spoon (that you don’t mind dyeing as well).

Salt and Pepper

The instructions now ask you to add 30 grams or 1oz of salt per tin, don’t ask me why!

On the boil

Next take a saucepan or metallic heatproof container (a metal bucket for example) that your other half or Mum won’t mind you discolouring and is large enough to fit all the items you want to dye in at once.  Now add the pint of water you have made up, the parts and fill the rest of the pan up with more water from a boiled kettle and place on the hob to simmer (that means putting it on at half power).

And wait…

The Dylon dye was obviously not originally marketed to dye plastic parts for RC cars and the instructions recommend leaving clothes simmering away for 20 minutes, I left mine in for about an hour just to be safe or you could pull them out early if you don’t want such a strong colour, grey instead of black for example.  Remember to add more hot water as the level drops to keep the parts covered if you leave them in for a while.

Drying

When you’re satisfied with the new colour of your parts, whip them out and leave them to dry on some kitchen paper or normal paper.  Not the nice Tea cloths though as you’ll end up with the outline of wheels or something on them!

Finishing off

I did at this point find myself with a half dyed wooden spoon so to finish things off I turned this round to colour the other end and give me a designer wooden spoon!