Coloured Lacrosse Balls?
Don Scott
I tried to dye lacrosse balls once and failed. I'm an engineer in a
paper mill that makes colored paper and I asked one of our dye suppliers
if he had any ideas. We tried to use a regular direct dye (Sort of in
the same family as RIT fabric dye.....but not really) and that didn't
stick to the rubber at all. Then we tried to "etch" the surface with a
solvent (Kerosene is handy in paper mills) and color the ball with a
pigment designed not to fade.......in paper (basically colored rocks as
opposed to a liquid that "stains" whatever it's trying to color.) Well
that didn't work either - it just rubbed off and the ball reeked of
Kerosene ......dumb idea. Then I gave up and bought some
silicones.....all is now fine in colored hard juggling ball land.
The only other idea I had was to use RIT fabric dye..... available in
grocery stores across the US as far as I can tell. This is the stuff you
make Tie Die shirts with etc...... Well, when I played Lacrosse in high
school we used to dye the plastic head of our sticks with this stuff to
personalize them. Basically you added the dye powder to hot water and
soaked the head in it overnight. The hotter the water the better dying
you got. This "might" work with a lax ball but I never tried it.
Good luck,
Don
PS - Sort of related subject.
Does anyone know how the silicone ball makers color their balls.....? I
ask this as a color scientist not as a potential manufacture (So Brian if
you're lurking give me a clue, common just for the pure love of knowledge
!!!)
I've taken my set of fine Dube' silies to our color booth at the mill and
the very bright colors tend to be highly UV reflective, which in the
case of paper is a major indicator of a tendency to fade
quickly.......but these don't so they must be using some sort of
lightfast pigment........which proves to be massively expensive !!!!!!
I've also noticed some swirls on some of the second's balls I've
got........I actually like the way they look. But form an analytical
sort of perspective this tells me that only the outside layer is colored
(which is totally logical as it is economic to only color the outside of
a product - we do that with paper, why pay for the colorants to color
the inside of a sphere ??) But that means they can't mix up on blob of
silicone, drop it in the mold and wamo.......no, no, no...... there must
be some intermediate step. Mix, form ball in some intermediate way,
then color the outside........sometimes this must fail and then I get a
neat swirly ball at some small discount..........This is something I've
wondered for a long time........ obviously.
PS. Please excuse me for reposting this. I posted it a few days before
Xmas and it seemed to vanish......now I couldn't find it on Dejanews so I
thought I'd try again.
Robert Groover
To: ads...@bcn.net
Subject: Re: Coloured Lacrosse Balls?
Newsgroups: rec.juggling
References: <34B17C...@bcn.net>
You can paint the surface of white lacrosse balls with plain old artist's
acrylics, which come in nice bright colors. They aren't
super-ultra-durable, but they take to the surface nicely.
Also, you can buy new balls in yellow and orange now, so there's a
little variety off-the-shelf.
Robert Groover gro...@netcom.com (PGP key on request)
Member ECS, AVS, ACM, OSA, Sen.Mem.IEEE, Reg'd Patent Atty
"All men by nature desire knowledge."
Tom Kuegler
You can get many different colors of lacrosse balls right off the
shelf. Red, Yellow, Orange, Flourecent Green, and Blue.
Try looking at LAX World... http://www.playlax.com