Where the
world gathers for metal finishing
Q&As since 1989


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Cold dye or UV reactive dye for aluminum?

We make jewelry, folding knife parts, and the occasional piece of art. (primarily 6061 aluminum type 2 anodize) my question is related to dyes. for the majority of our products we dye them by heating the dye up to 140 and soaking for several minutes. This works great for most things however we have some designs of a more artistic nature that we want to be able to "draw" or "paint" on using dye. The problem is our type of dye (our anodizer supplier dye, and have experimented with aniline based clothing dye) will not dye the material when it is cold (not heated to 140) we have toyed around with some permanent markers and they worked great..however colors are limited and it doesn't match our dip dyes. My question is, is there anything we can add to our dye to make it color well while cold? does anyone supply a cold style dye? on a related subject, a friend of mine got me interested in the idea of "UV reactive" dye (glows under black light) I have never seen this done on aluminum, is it possible? I think they add phosphorous to achieve this effect in other materials.. any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance for your help.

Jason Aube
machine shop - Flint, Michigan
2003

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I think that you would be happier with using inks.
There are some that are special made for anodized aluminum. Some are pad applied, some sprayed and some for silkscreen.

James Watts
- Navarre, Florida
2003