Homebrew Layout Fluid Experiments

[hman]

RIT dye is a commonly available (in the US) dyestuff, generally meant to be used in a clothes washing machine. It's available in a wide variety of colors.

Rit Fabric Dye

Color for your clothing, décor, crafts & more. Thousands of colors to choose from. Non-toxic. Made in the USA for over 100 years.

www.ritdye.com

As for IPA - I use it all the time. It's my "go to" solvent and cleaning agent. A LOT less toxic or irritating than mineral spirits, acetone, lacquer thinner, methanol, etc.

 

[graham-xrf]

RIT dye is a commonly available (in the US) dyestuff, generally meant to be used in a clothes washing machine. It's available in a wide variety of colors.

Rit Fabric Dye

Color for your clothing, décor, crafts & more. Thousands of colors to choose from. Non-toxic. Made in the USA for over 100 years.

www.ritdye.com

As for IPA - I use it all the time. It's my "go to" solvent and cleaning agent. A LOT less toxic or irritating than mineral spirits, acetone, lacquer thinner, methanol, etc.

Thanks for the enlightenment re: "RIT".
So it's a brand
I did not plan on exploring much more, because I do have some Dykem, and here, the main aim was to establish a cheap and workable alternative.

The fabric dye I happen have around is black, to alter the nearly white corn colour socks Xmas present. I am pretty sure that most any fabric dye will just work. The folk who get into anodizing do say one should use the "better" type for their lovely colour surfaces, so I guess what is fabric dye can vary some. Given the coverage, I think it likely you need only purchase it once, for a lifetime supply of fluid.

The same might be true of the shellac. I was playing with half a gram each, and the batch as delivered was 105grams.
A loose guess on how much I ended up with gets up to it being enough for most of a litre of fluid. It depends how much you need if you only paint where you need to mark. Some folk on HM have been using the same can of fluid for years!

There is a variant of ink recipe I have come across is to add some borax. Folk who do brazing may have some handy as borax flux.
That ink recipe is predominantly water based, using about 37.5% alcohol (150 of alcohol with 250 of water, 20 of shellac, 35 of borax, + dye).
I would try to not use water at all. If I get a chance, I might try it, but I am pretty sure most HM folk can get where they need to with what we now know.

 

[Suzuki4evr]

Thanks for that very well explained experiment. I have yet to do mine.

 

[aliva]

Found this on a quick google search
According to this file (Duke University PDF [1], or Google's HTML cache [2]) the ingredients of Sharpie markers are as follows:

• Dyes.
• Propyl alcohol (N-Propanol), 200-250 PPM.
• Butyl alcohol (N-Butanol), 50-100 PPM.
• Diacetone alcohol (4-Hydroxy-4-Methyl-2-Pentanone), 50 PPM.

 

[graham-xrf]

Found this on a quick google search
According to this file (Duke University PDF [1], or Google's HTML cache [2]) the ingredients of Sharpie markers are as follows:

• Dyes.
• Propyl alcohol (N-Propanol), 200-250 PPM.
• Butyl alcohol (N-Butanol), 50-100 PPM.
• Diacetone alcohol (4-Hydroxy-4-Methyl-2-Pentanone), 50 PPM.

Thanks very much - I found some links, but their "PPM" is not making sense to me.
https://askinglot.com/what-is-sharpie-ink-made-of

These solvents are fast evaporating very volatile alcohol hydrocarbons that are likely to give you a headache or maybe trigger asthmatic-like lung tissue reaction (wheezing) if you breath the fumes, or become sensitized to breathing fumes. In normal use, Sharpies are unlikely to affect anyone very much. The proportion of dyes will be tiny.

The inks are probably actual solution colours, rather than fine ground particulates, because they can infuse into materials and stain them permanently. For me, PPM means "parts per million". So when it says 200-250 PPM, I ask, "parts per million of what"?

I think whoever posted to Askinglot, and also findanyanswer.com fumbled on the units.

 

[aliva]

I would assume this is the ingredient, in red

• Propyl alcohol (N-Propanol), 200-250 PPM.
• Butyl alcohol (N-Butanol), 50-100 PPM.
• Diacetone alcohol (4-Hydroxy-4-Methyl-2-Pentanone), 50 PPM.

Possibly start with a known quantity of dye and add the ppm amount of each ingredient. Some experimentation is going to be needed.

 

[graham-xrf]

I would assume this is the ingredient, in red

• Propyl alcohol (N-Propanol), 200-250 PPM.
• Butyl alcohol (N-Butanol), 50-100 PPM.
• Diacetone alcohol (4-Hydroxy-4-Methyl-2-Pentanone), 50 PPM.

Yes - that is right.
N-Propanol can be 1-propanol, or 2-propanol. The stuff I used is 2-propanol, also called "IPA" or "Iso-Propyl Alcohol. "1" and "2" versions have identical chemical formulas. The difference is physical. It is always 3-carbon molecule. 1-propanol has the OH attached to a carbon on the end, and 2-propanol has the OH attached to the middle carbon. The OH is what makes these things alcohols. These isomers are near identical in what they do.

I chose IPA, or 2-propanol if you like, because you can get it 99.5% or greater purity at low cost.
Rubbing alcohol is a mix of IPA with a proportion of ethanol, methanol, and water.

My issue is the meaning of "PPM" in this context. That is not a quantity, nor even a recipe proportion! It is a concentration in parts per milliion. These are usually cited as hazard or health limit concentrations one might be exposed to. It makes no sense PPM in the context of what is in a Sharpie. The substances are named OK, but PPM?

For me, 250PPM means the amount of substance parts per million is 250/1million as a fraction = 0.00025 or 0.025%
That is meaningless in the context of using (say) a half a litre of alcohol solvent to get up a bottle of marking fluid, nor describing a Sharpie.

Does one suppose that 200-250PPM is the amount of propanol alcohol proportion of the mass of a plastic Sharpie pen including the top?

 

[Eddyde]

Aniline dyes are ubiquitous in industry. They are available either water or alcohol soluble, of course the latter is what you want.

 

[graham-xrf]

Aniline dyes are ubiquitous in industry. They are available either water or alcohol soluble, of course the latter is what you want.

Thanks Ed.
I had guessed that there may be some which might dissolve into only water, or alcohol, in an exclusive way.
I found that of the few I have tried, if they will dissolve into water, they will also dissolve in alcohol, but not always the other way around.
The advice with powder fabric dyes is to mix them into water first, then add that to the alcohol. If (when) I try fabric dye, I will first try going direct into the alcohol.

Part of the aim in getting into putting dye into shellac was to find a reasonable fluid using the cheapest most available ingredients for one of our colleagues who lives in Africa, where availability of stuff like this can be somewhat difficult, hit & miss, or unreasonably expensive. Raiding traditional ball-point pens is completely in keeping with the aim.

I don't know what the thick, concentrated goop used in ball-points actually is, but if you get a speck of it on paper, and wet it with alcohol from one side, it separates into the constituent colours i.e. "paper chromatography". They may be aniline dyes. They certainly are very concentrated.

 

[homebrewed]

Be careful with some of these organic solvents! I bought 500ml of butanol for a completely different project and later learned that it can react with oxygen to form a peroxide. Said peroxide has been known, under some circumstances, to explode. I freaked out and -- very carefully -- proceeded to turn it into water and CO2 using a process known as "combustion". Outside, a long way from anything that could be damaged by an explosion. No harm done, but I learned to research potential solvents before buying them. I knew about the hazards of diethyl ether but butanol....not at the time. I mean, it's an alcohol so what could POSSIBLY go wrong???

There are a number of solvents that can form peroxides so it's definitely something to keep in mind!;

I bought the stuff from Amazon (or maybe ebay), no hazmat fee, no caveats, so you've got to do your homework before getting chemicals you're not all that familiar with.

On a slightly different note, polystyrene foam readily dissolves in a number of solvents. It's mostly gas so easy to get a thin "varnish" blend. Acetone might work, or perhaps MEK or ethyl acetate. Add some dye and you might have a ready-made markup ink.