So I've known for a bit that people use Rit Dye on polymer furniture like Magpul MOE parts for AR's and AK's etc. So I figured I'd try it. The usual practice is for people to use a fairly high quality electrical tape, like Super 33 and cut out the shapes they want for their patterns before hand. Then progressively layer the tapes for different colors, all while heating the parts to make sure the adhesion was optimal etc. It sounded like a pain in the a**. So I tried it with hot glue. I decided to do Kuiu's Vias pattern, and in retrospect, I should have chosen something a bit easier for the first go, but, you gotta start somewhere. I used a bunch of Magpul Flat Darth Earth furniture for a Polish AK47, and dyed it.
I started with the "blacks" because there are 3 shades of "black"; a light gray, a dark gray, and black. This allowed me to draw my pattern on parts with pencil and label the areas with their color. Then glue over what I wanted to be any shade of brown. Then dunk it, glue over what is now light gray, and dunk it again. Then glue over what was now dark gray, and dunk it a third time for the black parts. Then I could glue over that and remove the initial glue from anything I wanted to be dark brown and dunk that in the brown mix.
I used a giant turkey basting pan with about a gallon and a half of water, and a teaspoon of black Rit dye at 180* for 12 seconds for the light gray. 25 seconds for the dark gray. The black I used a whole packet and left in in there for 30 seconds or more.
The tan had no dye at all, the dark brown was Chocolate Brown Rit Dye, probably 2/3 of a packet for 30 seconds or more at 180*.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with the pattern and the colors. But there did end up being some spots where I thought I had coverage with the glue and that wasn't the case. So there are spots where another color leached down and got where it wasn't supposed to. That's my fault, not the glues fault. Got a little impatient and paid the price. I also initially used a sharpy to lay out the black areas, because they often represent a hard border between the tan and another color, however, the sharpy caused dye not to stick where it was drawn. So I erased it with q-tips and isopropyl alcohol before dying the black. I may go back through and bleach out the parts where it bled into the tan, I think I'm stuck w what I got everywhere else though.
Oddly enough the black dye didn't effect the glue at all. It looked as if it was never dunked in dye. The brown however dyed the glue fairly darkly, so I'm glad I did it last, or I wouldn't have been able to make out the color codes through the glue. Of course without pics, it didn't happen. So...
http://s1193.photobucket.com/user/SGTDuffman/library/Rit%20Dye%20AK
