Hey everyone. I know this is getting to be a very long and old thread, but I figured I'd share my experience, especially since I've been browsing these forums for months, yet never posted anything.
First off, I stopped at 2 Sprint stores in my area. One of them (Maple Grove, MN) had a spare cover for me, the other didn't. I went to Wal-Mart to pick up some black and red dye. They had the powdered version of black, but the only red they had was "scarlet" as a liquid. So I bought both. It turns out the experience I had was basically the same between the two, so it really doesn't matter what you go with. Here's the process I used:
- I heated up a medium size pot of water on the stove until steam just barely started coming out, then turned down the heat to a minimum to sustain the temperature.
- I poured in about a tablespoon of black dye, and stirred it up until it was all dissolved.
- I carefully dropped in my spare battery cover.
- I kept stirring periodically, and checking periodically to see what the color was. Each time I checked it was a darker purple color, until after about 20 minutes it was black.
- I rinsed it off with cool water and dried it with a paper towel. Surprisingly, absolutely NO dye rubbed out into the paper towel! I thought there would be at least a little.
I wanted to add a reddish tint to the black, in hopes that it would have a red gleam when held in the light, so I repeated the process with the red dye. Unfortunately, the thing just stayed black. The black cover looked exceptionally good, but I just wasn't satisfied, so I tried something different with my original cover. With the red still in the pot, I clipped the battery cover onto a wooden spoon using some clothes-pins, and gently set the spoon across the top of the pot, so that the battery cover was suspended and only part of it was submerged. After probably about 10 or 15 minutes, it was a very nice red. It still wasn't dark enough for me though, so I added a little black to it and stirred it up. After re-submerging the cover at the same level, it came out the color I had in mind. I then flipped it around and did the other side a few times at different levels. I finished it off by adding more black and dipping the last section in for about 10 minutes. It turned out really cool. I then (unsuccessfully) proceeded to search the house for other things I could dye because it worked so well.
A couple things to take note of:
- You don't need very much dye if you use a pot that's about twice as wide as the length of the battery cover. Over the course of this whole thing, I used maybe a third of the black powdered dye and maybe a couple tablespoons of the red liquid. It might go faster if you use more, but I'm not sure.
- As has been said several times already, the water shouldn't be boiling hot, but just hot enough for a little steam to come out.
- Once the cover is black, it's black... You can't add any other colors to it.
- Mixing a little black into other colors can definitely darken them.
- From my experience, "buffing" the cover with a soft cloth was not really necessary. It came out without any of the weird streaks that other people mentioned.
- Interestingly, the black looks blacker after submerging it in red, yet it has no reddish tint to it.
- Also interestingly, the red stained the backside of the cover a little, but the black didn't.
- I just did this yesterday, but so far no dye has come off on my fingers, pants, etc.
Now, without further ado, the pictures!