"Changing Plastic Color" Topic

Saw a post on the Strelets forum awhile back where someone used RIT fabric dye to change the color of his plastic figs from tan to a blue shade. Has anyone ever tried to change the color of their figures?

Never done it, but it has one distinct advantage over paint, and The Dip: the dye would not flake off. Interesting idea. Seems like a great deal of effort, though, unless doing a large number of figures (100+?) all the same color.I would guess it only works for lighter colors of plastic, as well.

I will have to file that away, for possible future use. Thanks for posting. Cheers!

This is commonly done in remote control cars. White wheels are died whatever color you ca get. Not sure of the results when starting with other than white? The advantage is that you can patinate the figures for quick results. Would work very well for figures that have essentially one color for uniforms.

Apparently it worked quite well for the person who posted the thread – I guess RIT is also used to dye buttons which are fairly hard plastic so I guess it would work on softer plastics as well.

I may try it at some point – I have a few figs that I may never paint and they're bright white plastic.

Might test it on the sprues first though :)

It is apparently more art than science.

I had read extensively about doing this with action figures. Got all the right tools, followed all the instructions and didn't get one usable result on 8 attempts.

Works better with more rigid plastic. Can't see it working with action figures as they are painted usually?

The figures I was working with were the 80s era GI Joes. Most of them are cast in the main color of their uniform with only small areas painted and are a hard plastic.

The process was taken from a forum dedicated to action figures and there were numerous pics of successful attempts including 80's era Joes, modern Joes, Star Wars figures and others.

My only intent was to warn that there might be a steep learning curve. On the other hand the OP could be a natural and get it right the first time.

Consectari, thanks for sharing your experiences (especially the details about the types of plastic figures this has been done on -- the devil is in the details). Fore-warned, is fore-armed. Cheers!