By Peterson
#4808325
ImLost3 wrote: So if you wanna be perfect, you need those subtle color variations, but On-the-other-hand, during some recent filming, I discovered you can't really tell the difference between my dyed suit, a stock navy blue Tru-spec, and a 5 year-old faded black Rothco suit. So if you not totally awesome at dying, I would do as little as possible to just add a little grey tint to it, so you don't run the risk of tie-dying your uniform...unless you want that, then in that case, as you were.
Bill, good to see ya again! :cool:

And you know, especially early on, I was giving the idea of just trying to add some gray to the navy some serious thought. Would you think some Pearl Gray, or a quicker dip in some Black?

ETA: Finally got a natural light pic of my suit:

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Here it is with a pair of slacks I own, which *could* be described as Charcoal Gray. Unfortunately I did this one at a different angle so the color/glare is a bit wonky.

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By Peterson
#4808421
So, hit the Wally World today. And I found a huge assortment of liquid Rit dyes! The ubiquitous black of course, but also Royal Blue, even Kelly Green and Purple.

BUT....not a DROP of liquid nor a grain of powdered, Pearl Gray! :boogieman:

Someone smarter than me would probably take this as a sign...

I picked up the black and royal blue that's called for, and also 4 packs of color remover. For right now, the only thing I MIGHT use is a bit of the color remover to try and lighten the Navy on the suit just a bit more.
By Peterson
#4808429
Progress!!!!!!

I cut a swatch of fabric off the suit from the pocket on the upper arm. Let's name it Swatch 1.In a plastic cup, I used some of the color remover on it for about 5 minutes. Took it out and rinsed it and dried it on an old towel. The result was an ugly brownish blue. I took another cup and added some of the black dye (which does totally look purple). Left it in for under 5 minutes, remove, rinse, dry on towel. The results???
(All pics are with flash...the sun didn't decide to come out till all my pic-making was done.)

Compared to the Navy Tru-Spec:
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And here it is on some darkish gray pants I have (not that I'm using that color as my target, but just to get an idea)
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Not bad....not bad at all. Maybe could use a smidge more blue? I may see what happens if I hit it with some dilute Royal Blue.

So, I get ready to throw the dye in the cup out and go "hmmmm....." I cull Swatch 2 off of the lower leg pocket. I rinse it in hot water and throw it as-is into the dye for a rather quick dip (I don't wanna end up with a black suit!). The results?
Swatch 2 on my suit:
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Swatch 2 on the pants:
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Dark, but maybe not terribly so? But again, this is with flash. I'm wanting to go to the lighter end of the spectrum for my suit, rather than darker.

For good measure, I put more hot water and some Wisk in a cup and wash them (separately) and dry them good with a space heater.
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RUT-ROH! Looks like a good hunk of Swatch 2's coloring came out in the wash! Guess if I were to go that route it'd need a longer dye.

ETA: Just remembered,FWIW - I didn't add any salt. Anyone else use it besides Wharin?

ETA#2 (Don't want to spam the thread up!)
I did a weak solution of the Royal Blue on Swatch 1, though I found it hard to tell any appreciable difference...
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So, I've committed myself.
Someone THINKS she's about to supervise....I shut her out of the bathroom before the chemicals came into play. Note the gloves....I figured I'd grab another pair in case something went wrong rather than risk my uniform gloves. Figured I may as well get another pair I could wear with the uniform so I'd have a spare if things went okay!
And yeah, I was totally using a well-washed litter bucket to keep the suit soaking in while I prepped everything. ...hope that didn't have anything to do with an unexpected development....
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3 Gallons of hot water in a tote, the remainder of a packet of color remover (pretty much the whole thing). It was pretty wild....started out, you could see the navy coming out (way moreso than my work with the swatch). Then it turned, well, piss yellow! :-? I only left it in for about 5 minutes, then rinsed....then decided to go about another 4 minutes. I'm obviously feeling overly cautious here.

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A surprising but not at all unwelcome development. This is still after ONLY the roughly 90% of a packet of color remover, and a partial drying. I've already seen some shrinkage in the suit where I was trying to fade the color just by washing/hot water before, I want to avoid any further use of the dryer if I can help it. I'll have to wait until it's completely dry to see where I need to go from here - HOPEFULLY straight to the shop to get my GB2 Patches, but I'm still expecting to have some tweaking to do.

ETA 3 So far, so good. Suit's pretty dry. Color's holding. Suit hasn't disintegrated into a pile of thread. I'll try to get some pics up of the dry one for critique. Or for that matter take it and show to some of my friends - who won't have the foggiest what color the suits are in GBII, but can still hopefully tell me if there's a color poking through that shouldn't oughta.
By Peterson
#4808607
Now that it's totally dry, I think I can see a twinge of yellow in there...:(

And I can't believe that no one in town carries Kelly Green Rit in any form!!! It's only the local high school color...

So now trying to decide...do I wanna try to replicate my success with Swatch 1 and go straight to a black/blue dye combo? Or maybe gray and blue....I don't want to make it much more, if any, darker.

Swatch 1 was a bit more stripped of color....do I want to try to lighten it some more? Not really, since the gray is already there....

Do I want to hunt up some Kelly Green?
By Peterson
#4809209
Here's a pic of the suit totally dry:
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Heck, I even emailed the Rit "Dye Doctor," but no response yet. ...Anyone know where I can find a few Daleks and the home address of this Doctor's companions? ;)

ETA: Finished.
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And I didn't resort to threatening to have anyone ex-ter-min-ated! It's a bit darker than in the pic (used the flash). Don't think it's quite "perfect," but I'm pretty happy with it! Image
#4828829
I went this route this weekend and I just wanted to thank Austin for posting the original process. Also wanted to thank MBurkit and ShodanMark for answering my questions and documenting their own uniform dying.

Here's what I have achieved using the steps given in this thread.

No Flash

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Flash

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Natural Day light

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To the naked eye the suit is a much darker navy, like MBurkit highlights in the picture he posted wearing his suit. Really chuffed with how it came out so thanks to everyone who walked this path before me
User avatar
By Bob Wobbaz
#4829492
I've just snagged a Gibson and Barnes suit off ebay, navy, very very dark navy. The photos on the listing look bang on to being close to the screen accurate colour but I'm thinking that it needs lightening. Is it possible to use this dye recipe with a Gibson and Barnes?
By PssdffJay
#4829786
FunkPunkTwang wrote:
xSadisticSmilex wrote:Alright Gents, I have read all the tips and tricks to this flight suit dying experiment and am finally ready to go through with it. Granted I am terrified I might end up losing out on some money here, but heck. Whats the point in living if you never do anything?

My one question here is this. I am actually doing two of these suits. Has any one ever done more than one at a time? If so is it simply doubling the recipe? Should I play it safe and just do them one at a time?

Hey look at that. Was more than just one question.
I've dyed 8 of these suits, 4 at a time. I highly recomend doing them at the same time to keep the color consistent.

I"m curious about this question as well. I am about to do 6 suits and I was wondering if I should multiply the recipe by 6 or what?
#4829816
PssdffJay wrote:I'm going to try bumping this during the daytime. Hoping someone with multiple suit experience can shed some light.

Thanks!!
May wanna try PM'ing FunkPunkTwang. Pretty sure I read somewhere that he has died a big batch of GB2 suits for GBNH
User avatar
By ryan376
#4846719
I've done 2 navy blue tru specs using mburkit's method and both have turned out perfect charcoal gray. I used a 5 gal bucket with about 160° water. Only difference was i had to use a darker shade of green as my local store was out of alot of rit. I was only able to buy 2 packages of color remover but to adjust i left the suit in the bucket for twice as long. Thank you for the post. I was nervous that i was gonna ruin the suit until it came out of the dryer. Thanks again!!
By Zirkelbach
#4882105
Been following this post for a few months, since I decided to order a navy Tru-Spec flight suit. Here's the end results. I followed a bit of all the recipes found here. I'm really happy with the end results! Thanks for all the shared information! Time to add the patches now.

Before:
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After:
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User avatar
By csullivan1980
#4888863
This is one of the better detailed Navy to Charcoal Grey Suit threads I've seen. I ordered a Navy Blue Tru-Spec suit and will definitely give this a try. One thing I notice are streaks in some suits, could that be avoided by turning/stirring the suit in the color remover and dye mixture?
User avatar
By grantofkings
#4890911
So if the suit is at all Nomex, is it hopeless to lighten? I got two Tru Spec suits online that's 80% cotton and 20% Nomex, and I'm getting nowhere. Hit it in four different attempts with color remover, a total of 14 boxes. Last round was four in the washing machine because I gave up on hand-agitating.
User avatar
By GhostFaceX
#4962507
Ooooookay, so I've had my Tru-Spec navy suit for a long time, but always felt a bit of imposter syndrome with it. Like yeah, I like the idea of having a blue suit to be unique like each of the Real Ghostbusters, but this navy feels too close to being a wannabe charcoal GB2 suit. And I just really wanted that original charcoal suit from GB2. And in the future I'll buy another navy one and dye it royal blue. Or hot pink. So I went ahead and bought some dyes and stuff. This has been a wild, crazy experiment.

It's so hard to get the color, both brightness and temperature/tint, correct in pictures. So I've tried to use different lighting conditions and tried to alter some pictures to match in person looks.

First thing I did was got a pot of water nice and hot, and put in two packs of RIT color remover (they only had two packs at Hobby Lobby). I put the suit in there for a good three hours, and it was like nothing was coming off at all. I was ready to give up, but I put it in the washer and washed it with a couple of Tide pods and around a cup of bleach. That worked wonders! Not sure if it was the bleach or something to do with the color remover that helped. It turned into a pretty charcoal gray based suit after that. But very streaky and light.

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After bleach wash:

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So after this, it was time to go by the recipe posted in this thread. I first started with RIT liquid black, half a bottle. The recipe called for 45 minutes, but uhh literally 5 seconds after I dipped the suit in, it turned pure black. I kind of freaked out thinking I had made the suit completely black, but I went with it for a bit. I also dyed a white belt to go with the suit. The belt turned out to be a dark charcoal color, so a pretty good match.

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I took the suit out and put it in the washer with another Tide pod, then dried it. I could see I hadn't turned it black, but actually pretty much charcoal grey.

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Surprisingly, it had turned out to be a rather light grey. Aside from wanting to do it the same way everyone else did it with the recipe, it was too streaky and blotchy and some areas looked rather unevenly dyed. Or undyed. So I continued by dying it with a table spoon of Kelly Green powder (they didn't have liquid) and a table spoon of Royal Blue liquid dye. So essentially a 2 Royal Blue : 1 Kelly Green mixture. However the Kelly Green definitely overpowered the stew and it was pretty teal/green.

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I gave it a quick wash and dry and the result was looking ok, but there was a lot of unevenness and blotchiness. Some areas definitely had green tints. I could have just said I was slimed, but I'm picky, so I threw it back in with some more Royal Blue AND some RIT liquid Charcoal Grey. Wondering if I should just do charcoal grey the next time..but I like the idea of it having some blue in the mix to give it that blue cast in some lighting.

Here are some pics of the end result, which I'm pretty happy with. It's rather dark in person, but I think that's what the real ones probably were like. With bright lighting it LOOKS lighter, but without flash it's rather dark. I kind of wonder if it's supposed to be lighter, but maybe it'll fade after a few washes. In some lights it has a blue cast, in others it has almost kind of a tinge of brown. So I suppose that's a sign it's pretty neutral grey. I have no doubt the screen used ones probably really did look navy in some light.

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Here's a picture of the suits in the movie when they looked a pretty neutral grey.
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So my main problem is the color of the velcro strips. If I were to do a second one and want it to be as close as accurate as possible, what should I change? Should I start with a khaki or a black suit?
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