- Hydro dip more like (beep) - Trash. Oh - Boy. - We're gonna be hydro dipping today. You may have seen videos
of people hydro dipping, dipping apart into film covered water and pulling it out to get a
really cool looking design. How hard is it to do that though? Is it something I can do at home? Or is it something that a pro
will do a much better job at? Well today, Justin and
I are gonna find out. Should we DIY? - Or should we don't? (electronic music) ♪ Do it. Don't do it. ♪ - Big. Thanks to car parts.com
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word and people bought it. That's fantastic. - All right. Now on the surface hydro dipping seems to be
pretty straightforward. It's either a layer of paint or a pigmented film on
top of a bath of water. And as you pass a part through it the part sticks in a nice uniform way. But it seems like there's
gotta be a trick to it, right? I mean, what kind of
things can I hydro dip? What can't I hydro dip? What kind of paint can I use? Have you ever hydro dipped anything? - I have not. - Well, me neither. It's gonna be a day of learning. - Absolutely. - And you're gonna be
taking us through the first of our two methods of hydro dipping which is the spray paint method. - All we have to do fill
this water up a little bit spray paint into the
water, creates a film. Stick your part in. - It seems borderline insane. All right, well, let's
get the hell into it. - First. We have to
prime and prep the parts. (upbeat music) - All right. Well, Justin
primes this trim piece, let's talk about a few
things we gotta talk about. First off, cost on this method. It's pretty dang cheap. We spent like 15 bucks on the tub and you know spray paint
costs a few bucks a can. Seems like it's gonna be
a pretty quick project. You just prep a part and then dunk it in a bath with paint on it. Cost is gonna be low. Time's gonna be low. And similarly, I think effort will be low. Outcome. How good is this possibly gonna look? My expectations are a
little bit on the low side but maybe I'll be surprised. I wanna see like a leopard print pattern. - Oh. - [Zach] You're gonna do this at home, Make sure you're in a
well ventilated area. We, we have the right kind of water. - It says just water. Maybe we just need more
paint than we're thinking. This just doesn't seem
like it's gonna work. - You must agree. This looks awful, huh? - Yes. - [Zach] All right. Let's give this a shot. - [Justin] It's definitely
gonna look interesting. - [Zach] Yeah. Perfect Leopard pattern. Hey Siri, what does a leopard look like? (water splashing) (laughing) - I mean - Well - It looks just like
what it was in the water. - [Zach] Yeah. The outcome ain't quite
what I was hoping for. - The thing is, is this is so cheap. We could just start over. - It's true. This is kind of no, no harm, no foul. If you're doing any of this kind of stuff trying to learn a new process do it on parts you don't care about. We're about to revisit our spray paint hydro dipping method. Now that we've got the correct paint, we got acrylic water based paint. (hip-hop music) - [Zach] Hey, well, I
mean, that looks better. - [Justin] It does look better. So we did too much paint. - I didn't think that
that would be possible. See what happens? Well, that's an interesting look. I guess if you're doing the
spray paint hydro dip method You're gonna have to be
okay with some texture. You can get a kind of cool pattern little starry night vibe. - [Justin] It really does look like we just dumped this
into a can of house paint. - Yeah. It looks like we
sprayed paint on water, (laughing) and then dumped a part in it. Okay. Moving on from the
ultra DIY spray paint dipping method. We're gonna move on to
the much more or legit and hopefully more straightforward film dipping method. Where you have an actual printed out pigmented film like this. And this ultimately is gonna
be what gets transferred onto our parts, a kit with all the contents that you need to do a film dipping like this, will cost you about $60 and it'll include whatever film you want and an activator. Uh, let's get into it. Let's start dipping. All right, So the first
thing we're gonna do is cut out the amount
of film that we need. Cut out a little square. Now, you notice how badly
this wants to curl up. And that's, that's a problem. What we need to do is make
a border around this thing with just masking tape and
that'll help keep the film undistorted as we put it in the water. Okay. Now that we have this tape border that's gonna keep our film from curling up when we put it in the water, but the film needs to be
able to expand a little bit as it absorbs water and
with the tape as it is now it won't be able to do that. So what we have to do is
cut a few slits in the tape all the way through to
the film, like this. Just every few inches. Okay. Now the edges won't curl up but the film can still
expand as it needs to which hopefully it will
yield a good result. Okay. So another
important thing to note is that there is an upside
and a downside to this and if you get it wrong, it won't work. So in this case, the dull
side is that which goes up that will touch our part. (soothing music) So we're gonna kind of start in the middle and work to the corners. It's also incredibly important to not get any water on top
of the film once it's in. Okay. So we're gonna
give that about a minute, to absorb water. I've got a couple little air bubbles that may give us a little
imperfection at the end. Oh well, I guess, so now I need to spray
this with activator. I'm gonna give it just one kind of even medium coat
over the whole thing. And then give that a second
and then we're ready to dip Roll the part in, pick it up on out. Okay. So we've got our little shroud here that we just hydro dipped and at first glance,
it doesn't look too bad especially for my first crack at it. But uh, when you look a little closer, you can see a few issues. First off, you can see the primer in these few spots. Those are air bubbles that
got trapped under the film Here, you can see the
film ripped a little bit. I gotta pay attention really to how I dropped the thing in. I should have been sure to get that front dipped
first and dipped well. I didn't, and now it looks horrendous. So there's not much I can do about that after the fact except learn from it. If you can tell this
thing sort of looks shiny and dull in spots and that's that residue
I was talking about. You can even see it
kind of coming up here. Felt like I rinsed it forever. Not long enough. Will you gimme a grade? - [Justin] compared to
how the spray paint went, this is a B plus - I'll take a B plus. - Yeah. - Generous some would say. - Very. Very. - All right so like I mentioned before, it's very important to make sure that you use your film
in the right direction. That is like right side
down, right side up. What you can do to figure it out is take a little bit of your activator on a rag and wipe the sides. Ah huh. So the side that the pattern comes up on that's the side you want facing upwards. So I actually have this
upside down right now. Do the activator test
and then you'll be sure. I'm gonna cut this so that
it pretty well matches the size of the tub. It could be said that this is a little
bit too big for the tub. We're pivoting. I'm gonna use this smaller piece and dunk this right now. Activator. (electronic music) Oh. Ah. (beep). It's gonna be cool. It's gonna give it a cooler effect, the double dip. All right. So our last experiment
turned up some results. First off, we definitely need to
have like a base coat and a very nicely prepped
product before we go dipping it way more fun to find out
the hard way, isn't it? Our hubcap which is
what we're gonna do now, is nicely prepped. It's primered, and it's ready to go. I'm gonna use this carbon fiber look stuff and we're gonna step up
to a larger tub this time. So I have a little bit more room, hopefully turn out a decent result. I'm gonna need to make a tape barrier. We really want only want
it to have about an inch with which to expand. And then that's just enough, so that when we lay the film
down it won't be able to expand past that piece of tape. This is one of the most important parts laying this down in there so that there's no air trapped underneath it and no water that gets on top of it. So see what we can do. Try to get any air trapped. You see how kind of crinkly this paper is. So I'm really concerned
that there's little air bubbles trapped in all those crinkles, but new paper isn't gonna be this crinkly. Okay. Let's see where we get. (electronic music) Wow. Wow. Okay. So let's review our hubcap. It seems to me that a good
candidate for hydro dipping is something that's gonna
be mostly a convex shape. When you get into these concave areas there's just not enough
film to cover it all. There's all sorts of little
like imperfections in this. If you look closely,
it looks like, you know almost water spatter or something. I'm not really sure or why that happened, but it did, and it doesn't look very good. I think the hubcap wasn't
the best candidate. So we're gonna try the film one more time. We're gonna use the helmet. (soothing music) Oh God. I touched it. Well alright, We'll give
that about a minute, and then we'll rinse it forever and see what the final product looks like. I'm not sure if I rinsed
too hard this time or what but the pattern has sort of just faded away. It hardly looks like carbon anymore, and I don't really know why that happened. - [Countdown] Three, two, one, Hooray. - Okay. Well, we've been
using this old ass dip film. This stuff is fresh, brand
new right out the bag. And it is soft and smooth
and not crinkly at all. This is definitely the one
I'm gonna be going with a pink camouflage. As you probably expect from me, let's find something to dip. Oh boy. Wow. It's almost like having
good quality materials makes the job go a lot better. We got our best result yet. Hands down. This has been a little bit
trickier than expected. I really am excited to talk to a pro. This is the first time that
we didn't talk to a pro first. And maybe that was my undoing, but we're gonna go talk to a of now and I'm hopefully gonna learn
what the hell went wrong here. Okay. So today we've got Brian Westbrook from liquid concepts. They do a lot of hydro dipping. I'm gonna try to dip one more part today and I'm gonna try to get it right. So, look at some of the things we dipped and hopefully find out what went wrong. First, the, the hub cap is a hub cap like that a good candidate
for hydro dipping. - Some films will wrap down in here and, and they look great. You know, other films, like in particular like this carbon that you picked as it stretches you see it a lot more. - [Zach] Yeah. - Every film is, is going to have it's good and it's bad. - All right, well that
not only makes sense but makes me feel a
little bit better as well. (laughter) - [Brian] Right? - [Zach] We sent you
the helmet also, right? - [Brian] The, the rips and
the tears that you've got it was probably a little
bit under activated as well. The activator is very, very critical. That's probably gonna be like 95% of all of your problems in the dipping world. The biggest thing is,
is that it's got a glass out on the water before you dip it. - Okay. So I gotta find the sweet spot. - Yes, yes, exactly. - I'm armed with way more info than I had last time I tried to do this. So I think we might be able to get a, get a properly dipped piece today. Get off my finger. Gotta get one good, thick coat. (hip-hop music) Oh (beep) Well, hot dog. Okay. Well, this is definitely
easily our best work yet but I still wouldn't quite call it. Perfect. You can see splotchiness
kind of throughout but it looks pretty good. Let's talk about it. Let's break it down. First off, let's talk about the spray
paint hydro dipping method. I didn't like the results that we got, but I also, I'm not quite sure that our method was completely air tight. From what I hear, they actually make
specific spray paint that is meant to do spray paint hydro dipping. So, if you get that, your results will probably
come out a little better, but the results that me and Justin got, I would give a big fat thumbs down. Now let's talk about the
film method of hydro dipping. The more legit method. Pretty dang cheap to be able to really changed the look of a lot of parts. So cost is pretty dang good. Now let's talk time. The act of dipping itself is pretty quick, a lot quicker than painting something and way less messy. Time? pretty dang good
in my opinion, as well. Effort is pretty minimal. It's a little bit of stress because there's so many things
you're trying to remember and trying to do a good job, but I think once you get over those things and you're, you know, actually good at it,
the effort is super low. All right, now let's talk outcome. The, the toughest part of
this whole conversation. I'm not super happy with the outcome. Definitely, wasn't happy
with the spray paint outcome but the film hydro dipping once we started using our fresh film it was a lot easier to
get a pretty good result. Although, I still am having some minor issues. So I would say for me, DIY style, the outcome, ain't great. If you're a DIY guy like me, then hey, take a crack at hydro dipping. It is definitely a cool process that is worth getting your hands dirty for. I enjoyed learning about it, even though I'm not super
happy with the results. And sometimes, that's what all about
just learning. You know? - Thank you sharks for joining me today. There are two things you need to go fast, big power and lightweight. I've spent hours of
research and development to bring you this (clapping) - Roll, that sick montage Like this video smash
the subscribe button. You can go follow me
on Instagram @zachjobe, follow donut @donutmedia, follow Justin at
@justinfreeman on Instagram. Goodbye.
