Disc Dying - Confetti

I've recently taken up disc golf, and most of my discs now get some form of custom dye to make them easier to identify, plus it's fun to make them. 

Confetti Dye

There have been a few of these showing up on Reddit /r/discdying and for sale in various places. They look a bit like the stock Vibram discs, flecks of colour on a plainish disc.

The basic process is a shaving cream dye, but the dye powder is sprinkled on top and left for a few hours. I recently made an order from Dynamic Discs, mostly for some extra putters, towels, minis, shirts and a Birdie Bag for wet rounds, but the shipping was going to be much the same so I added a mixed 10 pack of misprint discs. There are a few nice light coloured discs in there, that while I may not add them to my bag, they'll make for some interesting dyes.

Shaving cream bed

Among these was a pink Lucid Defender - an even more overstable Enforcer, and one I will probably need on windy days if I throw much faster than I currently do, so it's going in my bag. Which means it needs to be dyed. I had seen a few confetti dyes, and wanted to try it out, but most of my dye has been mixed so I had to go with purple iDye Poly.

Sprinkle dye on top. Use a spoon, there is too much on this one

The hope was for a dark nebula kind of pattern on the translucent pink disc.

I started with 90 minutes, but it only left a light dye on the disc.

Just after placing the disc on the dye bed. 

I started again, and left it for 4 hours, and while better it's still not as dark as I'd like.
A few ways to make a more obvious dye would be to:

• use black dye
• spraying acetone on the dye before placing the disc
• increase the time to 12 hours/overnight
• add hot water to the base of the disc. 

There is a light nebula pattern 

Disc Dyes II

Disc Dyes II
After the success of last time , I wanted to push the limits a little more with a few different ideas.

A negative dragon -

A dragon dyed on green translucent plastic (Westside discs - Opto Fuse), I made it a negative dye, keeping the dragon green and translucent, and making the rest of the disc a very dark green/black. If you hold it to the light it is still slightly translucent. The intention was to achieve a much lighter dye, but the Opto plastic takes dye very quickly. I'm still happy with the dye despite this, and a little excess dye that I got on the back side, thankfully not over the dragon itself.

Multi dip dyes

There were two multi-dip dyes I wanted to do, a death-star in gray and black, and a companion cube, with 2 levels of black. Sadly I couldn't source iDye poly locally in gray, and I wanted the discs completed for the Sizzler ACT champs this weekend, so I had to achieve the gray colour using less time, rather than a different dye.

The death star

Dynamic Discs - Purple/gray Fuzion Renegade Finding a suitable image was a challange, I wanted the in construction look, but with a simple 2-3 tone colour scheme and simplified. I couldn't find anything with all of these features, so I ended up modifying one quite extensively to make it look partial. There were a lot of parts to this stencil, lots of cuts, and minimal structural integrity, it wasn't too hard, just time consuming. I'm looking forward to getting a plotter at some point to speed up this process. I dyed the black first, then weeded the gray portions and dipped again for 30secs to a minute, I really liked the light gray at this point, but sadly I had missed one of the squares, and it was already outlined in black from the cuts, so I chose to do another very short (10-30 secs) dip. I'm pretty happy with it, but I would have liked to keep the lighter gray.

My Companion Cube

Dynamic Discs - Pink Classic blend Warden The Classic plastics don't dye well, and the stamp is pretty deep. I decided to give it a try as I thought that I might get more wiggle room when making the gray areas. I still like the design, but the end result wasn't great, some gray areas were too light and lots of runs. Interestingly the Classic Blend seemed to dye worse than the Classic soft, I likely won't try it again.












 I used hockey stick tape to do the transfer this time rather than masking tape, which worked quite well, probably not much different really. A thicker adhesive plastic, and a non-clear one might help to make things easier, sometimes it's hard to tell whether you've pulled up the film or not. I'll be getting a few new colours of dye, and then I want to get a cutter or a record player to try a few new things, but the next dye will be another 3 colour multi dye on a nice white Lat64 gold line disc, should turn out well, but I'm still working out what order to do the colours in, and to get some gray dye in.

Disc Dyeing

I've recently taken up disc golf, and decided to customise a few discs now that I have some decent plastic that will take dye properly.

Materials

Discs - In this case I had a few premiums, DD biofuzion and Discraft Ti and I did a few practice runs on DD classic blend
Dye - iDye Poly, in red and black. each mixed in 500ml of water and kept in mason or equivalent jars between uses
Contact self adhesive covering
Acetone - for wiping stamps
Stencils
Exacto knife & cutting board
Light table
a pot large enough to fit the discs.

The process

Print the stencils, prepare a piece of contact that is at least 5cm more than the diameter of the disc. Either trace the stencil onto the contact, or cut it out directly using the light table.
Remove the areas that you want to dye, and leave the others in place. I'm still working on the best way to keep the geometry for small pieces intact. In this case I cut the contact from the front side, added masking tape over the top, flipped the new mask and removed the pieces to be dyed entirely, then the backing paper from the remaining sections.

The disc can then be lowered onto the contact, placing it in the desired location if possible, a clear bench might assist in this process. Flatten the edges of the contact around the stencil, and make sure to do the edges of the previous stamp as well.

Put the 500ml of dye in the pot, and ensure that there is enough to float the disc in. Heat the dye until it steams slightly then turn it off or down to prevent burning.

Wash the disk and mask to remove any residual glue, and to ensure that there are no air bubbles when you dip the disc. Slowly lower the disc into the pot, and allow it to float there. Readjust it occasionally to check the progress of the dye and to ensure that all areas get dyed properly.

When the dye is as dark as you want, remove the disc and run it under cold water to remove excess dye. Peel the contact off and wash again. I haven't yet found a good way of removing the gunk left behind by the contact.

Ti Buzz, plain green originally, now with a black gecko. It dyed nicely, and looks original, although there were a few areas where the masking leaked and the dye ran. 

BioFuzion Tresspass, grey colour, with a black dyed star destroyer. A lot of runs and issues on this one, but it turned out well anyway. 

The two Classic blend Wardens were dyed mostly for practice, I'd heard that they were unlikely to dye properly, in the case of the red dye on the white warden, it took a lot longer, and the red was still very faded. The black dye went over the blue nicely. Unfortunately I got the stencil backwards and didn't notice...

I'll post again with a progress report when I see how much and how they fade.