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geekhack Community => Keyboard Keycaps => Topic started by: Wintermoot on Fri, 17 August 2012, 14:13:08
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hello GH first time poster here.
I,m planning to dye the caps on this old KB I get lying around here and I would like to know what sort of dye I should be using.
I was thinking of using cloth dyes.
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Someone dyed a set of PBT keys and wrote a how-to on that. Will search for it when I get to my PC.
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http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=27237.0
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Hahaha! I thought your keycap was dying. As in not alive. You mean dyeing. LOL
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http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=27237.0
thanks but the thing is I don't have access to RIT dye's can any old cloth dyer do the job?
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Hahaha! I thought your keycap was dying. As in not alive. You mean dyeing. LOL
hehe...
As for using clothing dye, I wouldn't think it would be as effective, but I suppose it can't hurt to try, could it?
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Hahaha! I thought your keycap was dying. As in not alive. You mean dyeing. LOL
hehe...
As for using clothing dye, I wouldn't think it would be as effective, but I suppose it can't hurt to try, could it?
Don't melt your keycaps, though.
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Don't melt your keycaps, though.
Oh, yeah... probably should have emphasized that. :))
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People have tried things other than RIT, but I don't think anything has been found that works as well. In particular, some tried Dylon and the results were very washed out. If your keys are not PBT you need to be super careful about melting them with too much heat.
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My experience has been that RIT powder works great on PBT, but that the liquid is all but useless on plastic.
Black was awesome but all the other dark colors I tried came out muddy and uneven.
Bright colors like scarlet and sunshine orange were particularly nice.
I have tried to dye ABS more than once, with a few pitiful successes and a lot of failures.
The effective temperature of the dye may be a few scant degrees below than the soften/melt temperature of ABS, but the range and tolerance is very small. There is no point in mentioning numbers, because your results will vary according to your equipment. I will say for certain that it is well below the boiling point.
You can only trust trial and error. Go to a thrift store and buy some $1 junk keyboards for experimentation.
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Rit dye is the way to go. The only issue my brother had when he did it was that he didn't let all of the alcohol evaporate when cleaning the keys before dyeing so some of them had an uneven sheen.
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Is there any custom dye-sub company? I have a lot of keycaps with no engraving. It will be great if I can print what I want.
Just dyeing cannot satisfy me.
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you can try asking imsto, but you'd have to ship them out to china.
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I've read 'metal spraypaints' such as Krylon X-Metals and Duplicolor Metalcast work well with ABS plastics. I haven't seen any examples yet of them on keycaps, so I may have to try it out myself. Basically, the spraypaint acts like a vinyl dye and is absorbed into the plastic. Here is an example on a classic gameboy to get an idea:
(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2554/3845269816_19bb06daef.jpg)
This was an ol' grey brick sprayed with one coat of X-Metals. You can see how it absorbed into the plastic, but left the printed text intact. The process was supposedly quick, drying in less than 10 minutes. I think this could potentially work well for keycaps too, and could be a better alternative to coloring ABS caps, since it is sensitive to the higher temperatures of RIT dyeing. PBT is more resilient in that regard, though I've heard the reports of uneven coating. I wonder if these particular paints will take to PBT as well, only one way to find out :) for science! Thoughts?
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That GameBoy photo looks really promising.
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Please keep us posted on the short-term and long-term prognosis on this process.
This could be huge!
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My experience has been that RIT powder works great on PBT, but that the liquid is all but useless on plastic..
Just want to attest to the general ****tyness of the liquid dye for key caps. I've tried a few different colors on PBT and it simply doesn't take.
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My experience has been that RIT powder works great on PBT, but that the liquid is all but useless on plastic..
Just want to attest to the general ****tyness of the liquid dye for key caps. I've tried a few different colors on PBT and it simply doesn't take.
Did anyone successfully took PBT keycap color modification yet?
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My experience has been that RIT powder works great on PBT, but that the liquid is all but useless on plastic..
Just want to attest to the general ****tyness of the liquid dye for key caps. I've tried a few different colors on PBT and it simply doesn't take.
Did anyone successfully took PBT keycap color modification yet?
I have seen some successful PBT dying. Perhaps the best was an HHKB that had been dyed, which looked really good.
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I'll test out some of the various methods, perhaps this weekend if I can get all the materials together by then. I should be able to get both brands of paint easily, and I already have some RIT powder dye. I'll try to use a few different types of keycaps as well for variety.