I intended to continue to avoid clear plastics, but when I wanted to buy a Latitude 64 disc I could only find clear ones in the weights I wanted. I perused the Latitude 64 thread on the forum at www.discgolfreview.com (DGR) to see if this had been addressed. It had; the recommended solution was to simply dye the disc another color yourself.
One of the topics on the DGR forum is Disc Artwork. I don’t consider myself much of an artist, but I figured I’d peruse it to learn enough to make clear discs visible. The post entitled ACID’S DYE TUTORIAL is very useful. Turns out, all you have to do is dilute powdered RIT with water, slightly heat it in an old skillet that you never intend on cooking with again, float the disc on top until it’s the desired darkness and quickly rinse with cold water. My girlfriend gave me a packet of navy Blue RIT dye. I also asked her if she knew what contact paper was, and she reached into a closet and produced a roll.
I figured I might as well put a design on the disc, so while the diluted dye was warming, I cut a few random stripes out of the contact paper and stuck them to the disc, which reminded me of clouds, so I developed them into a scene of sky and water with a ship in the distance. Although it ended up more purple than blue, I thought it turned out pretty good:
(The double-image effect was caused by the shadow cast on the countertop it was sitting on when I took the photo.)
I have since dyed dozens of discs. It is very satisfying to personalize your discs, and not unlike giving them tattoos. When I dyed the San Francisco logo on an orange Z Avenger, I realized the disc became immediately more visible for the same reason why, in a crowd of people, a person displaying a shirt referencing your favorite team, hometown, etc. will stand out. Our eyes are wired to latch onto symbols with meaning.
A limitation on this endeavor is that baseline plastics, such as Innova DX or Pro, don’t hold dye. You can get them to change color, but I’ve not been able to get them dark or vibrant and subtle lines won’t work. The most serendipitous result of an effort to try to dye a plastic was soaking a Gateway Glow Wizard in black dye and having it come out a glorious bronze:
I dyed a couple other Wizards, and quite enjoy how gnarly the silhouette of Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre came out:
I am also partial to the depiction of Albert Ayler’s “Spiritual Unity” album cover:
The logo stamped on most discs when you purchase them is called a “hot stamp.” This can be blotted off with a cotton ball soaked in acetone, which can be found in the paint aisle of a hardware store. At first, I was using fingernail polish, which is diluted acetone, but it doesn’t work at all and I ended up with scratched up discs from trying to force the stamps off. You want to dab the stamp and not attempt to wipe it off, which will cause it to smear all over the disc. You also want to do this over a sink or something, so you don’t end up dripping acetone and stamp dye everywhere. Discraft’s stamps are imprinted deeper into the plastic than Innova’s, resulting in a permanent indentation even after the ink is removed, called a “ghost stamp.” Scratches and the ghost stamp can be seen on this Discraft Glow Stalker that I put Morpheus from Sandman comics onto:
Sometimes, I decide to leave part of the original logo, and put Scotch tape over the part to remain while using the acetone, but this is an imperfect method as the acetone can actually melt off the tape. Here’s one of my favorite discs, where I left “Teebird,” because for some reason seahorse-teebird is funny to me:
Designs are made by covering what you don’t want dyed with contact paper, which is thin vinyl with a sticky-side. It is mostly used on the inside of kitchen and bathroom drawers. In many stores, it is in the same aisle as large plastic storage bins. I recommend the clear kind, as you can see what’s going on underneath it during the process.
Upon removing the contact paper, some residual stickiness is often left behind that is difficult to remove. I’ve tried dish soap, Goo-Gone and WD-40, but have yet to find a solution better than time and obsessive thumb-rubbing.
When starting a new project, the first thing you need to do is decide whether you want the image itself or the remainder of the top of the disc to remain uncolored. It seems obvious, but I’ve messed up and pulled off the wrong half of the vinyl more than once, and now sharpie “keep” on whatever I don’t want dyed. If you want the image dyed, you will need to cover the entire face and wing of the disc with contact paper.
Next, put the design under the contact paper and trace it using sharpies. I use a fat one to fill in large areas to be cut out and a fine one for lines. I found an old light table that is very useful for this task. If more than one color or shade is going to be dyed into the disc, I note this with sharpie, because otherwise I tend to forget what I’m doing later. You are always going to want to dye the darkest color first, especially outlines. Here’s a somewhat complicated design, FC Barcelona’s logo, drawn and labeled:
There is a machine called a plotter that can cut out designs in contact paper, but I’ve never used one. I’ve always cut out the design using a regular X-acto knife, but my girlfriend got me a 360º swivel blade X-acto for Christmas, and I look forward to using it as it should make my life easier, especially when cutting acute curves. It’s sort of like carving a pumpkin, but more delicate: imagine creating shapes by carving only the peel off an apple. The most difficult shape I’ve cut out so far, which I didn’t anticipate, was a Klingon logo. I made the thin black lines by holding two blades together (the disc was originally red), but there’s surely a better method!
According to the rules established by the DGA, it is legal to infuse ink into the disc but illegal to alter a disc in any way using any cutting tool. This means you are technically supposed to cut out the design before sticking the contact paper to the disc. This severely limits the type of designs that can be done, or at least increases the labor involved, requiring any isolated shapes to be individually placed. The vinyl is very thin, and you don’t want to press very hard at all while cutting it, but it is impossible to not make minor scrapes into the disc. If you want to use a disc you’ve cut a design into in a tournament, you have to lie and say you cut it out before you stuck it to the disc.
Every little knife slip will be revealed by the dye. You can fix most mistakes by taping Scotch tape over them. The hardest mistake to fix is moving an edge slightly inward after removing the vinyl. You have to hold the disc at just the right angle under a desk lamp to see the cuts you’ve made, and Scotch tape adds glare and makes this task more difficult. For this reason, you want to lift your blade as infrequently as possible. Unfortunately, you have to lift the non-swiveling X-acto to make sharp turns, as doing otherwise will gouge into the disc. Also, if you slip and cut into vinyl not to be removed, lift the blade and tape over it immediately, and then continue by cutting from the opposite direction so the blade doesn’t follow the same groove.
I remove each section of vinyl using tweezers as soon as I get it cut, assuming of course that section is to be the first if a series of dyeing is to be done. Because the cut lines are so difficult to see, it is easy to forget to remove stuff that’s supposed to be removed. While removing, pull against any portions where edges meet to avoid lifting or ripping the vinyl. This is where bleed it most likely to occur. Double-check that every piece of vinyl has been removed, as sometimes the vinyl tears and leaves behind an unintended portion. I’ve also had removed pieces find their way stuck in some random location back onto the disc instead of in the trash. Here’s the Barca logo disc with the first portion to be dyed removed:
I mix powdered RIT in a glass Ball jar with water so that I can see the color. I made an early mistake of putting the lid on and shaking the mixture, which caused it to froth, and then I had a whole bunch of bubbles to get rid of before I could put the disc into it. I now stir it with a plastic knife. You can store the mixture into the jar after use, however, and it can be re-used indefinitely.
You don’t want the dye to get too hot before floating your disc onto it, as doing so will cause the contact paper to loosen at the edges allowing bleed will occur. I heat the mixture on low for several minutes (if it starts smoking, it’s too hot) then turn off the burner completely before sliding the disc in at a slight angle to provide an exit for any air bubbles, which will create little circles in the finished product. After letting it soak for 5 minutes, I quickly lift to check for loose contact paper, bleed, air bubbles and that the temperature is correct. An annoying problem with ghost stamps to look for is they can create a channel in which the dye can seep under the contact paper.
If there is bleed or lifting at this point the best solution is to abort the process by rinsing and letting the disc and contact paper cool and dry. Then, squirt Elmer’s school glue under the contact paper in the problem area, wipe off the excess and let it dry overnight before trying again. While putting the FC Barcelona logo on a Discraft Glow Buzzz, the dye bled into the ghost stamp where the bee was on the original design, which I was too lazy to fix until I’d dyed the outline for 20 minutes. Solid black usually takes 30 minutes. In this case, I tried to take advantage of the fact that the black was looking blue in its early stages and removed the section covering what are supposed to be blue stripes and did ten more minutes in black:
I have done several experiments taking advantage of using the same dye but removing portions of the vinyl at different times to create various shades. Again, I number the order in which each area is to be removed to avoid confusion during the process. The color of the disc in progress is hard to judge, because the vinyl covering darkens as well. Upon removing the vinyl at the end, the dyes tend to be darker than you thought. The color spread, from lightest to darkest, is typically 3 to 30 minutes, and you need to anticipate that the first colors in will continue to get darker during the process. I rinse the discs and reheat the dye while removing each level of contact paper. Here are some results:
Doing an outline in black and then removing the vinyl it is surrounding and filling it in with another color looks very nice. Comic books provide a great resource for utilizing this technique, as it is not dissimilar to the process they use of having one person ink and another fill in the color. You can actually make a thin outline simply by dyeing it after cutting but before removing any vinyl, but thicker, bolder outlines look better. Here’s the X-Men character Beast on a disc called Beast:
This is a perfect example of how hard it is to keep track of what stays and what gets removed. There is a glaring gaffe that probably most wouldn’t notice until pointed out. It’s supposed to look like this:
On the Barca logo disc, I could tell right away the stripes were not the color I'd wanted, being more purple than blue, but I worried about them getting black if I left it in too long. This was my first attempt at adding three different dye colors. I glued the vinyl back onto the blue stripes (I had simply saved the sections after removing them) and removed the sections to be dyed red:
For some strange reason, I decided to remove the covers I’d put back on the blue stripes before doing the yellow:
This did not help them look less purple. The most frustrating part, to me, is that upon cleaning the disc I discovered that the bleed from the beginning was exactly the blue I had wanted the stripes to be!
I’m realizing, especially given my level of talent, with disc art it’s prudent to incorporate the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) principle. Speaking of which, this is more than enough disc golf discussion for awhile….
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