Better PVC Bamboo

I'm not going to retread any ideas for PVC enrichments here, just show you how to make them look a little more interesting. There are a ton of ideas out there but they may not always be well received by your curators and directors who are looking for a more naturalistic look to your exhibits.

PVC is a versatile and relatively cheap material that we know well and love to use for it's ease to cut, drill, and clean. But it's ugly. So let's fix that.

A few years ago a tutorial came out in Make: showing how to dye PVC with a permanent stain. The author added fuel dye to a canister of clear cleaner to create a PVC stain. This is not color painted on top but pigment integrated into the PVC itself. Imagine that at the microscopic level your section of pipe looks like a brick of ramen. Normally when you want some color you're painting it and that's like slathering the top of that ramen with some delicious sriracha sauce. It sticks for a while, but eventually it's going to chip off. What a waste. But by using the clear cleaner stain, it's like you're cooking that brick of dry ramen in water infused with sriracha already. The solvents quickly dry out of the PVC and likewise the ramen goes back to being hard with the sriracha trapped within. God I'm hungry.

Now, where to get that dye? It's still being sold by Narad Marketing like in the Make: article from their scarily basic looking website, but don't worry, they're legit! Remember, I got my zoo's finance department to buy some from their Ebay store! Only some 300 people have bought it so far so you can be at the head of the trend in doing this project.

I got the 1/4 ounce variety pack of 10 for $35 which isn't too bad since I only had to use 1ml per 4 ounce can of Oatey clear cleaner (any brand will do). Buying all the cans of clear cleaner does add up so really get generic if you can. I made test pieces of PVC so you can see how vibrant the colors are. These were all painted wearing nitrile gloves, outside, using the little brush that's attached to the lid of the cleaner can.

The resulting stain is very runny, but if you've ever used purple primer when joining PVC it's pretty much the same idea, except now we're going to get color everywhere on purpose.

On the left you can see a piece I made with yellow as an undercoat and then added random orange streaks. The solvent dries very quickly so you can go from color to color in no time. There is some runniness so try to go from lighter to darker colors. The right piece is all orange.

The left piece was my bamboo inspiration. The middle piece is a yellow undercoat with green streaks on top. That looked pretty good by I wanted a darker color. The right piece is an orange undercoat with green and was closer to the real bamboo color which I liked. For fun I splattered red randomly and I like the effect.

I torched the "rings" that are the solid nodes of bamboo because I like the mix of textures and colors that are in the final product. But I understand that burning PVC does release potentially toxic gasses into the air so if that is a concern for you please leave that step out. If you want that next step of adding nodes you can just use a colored sharpie or even a cotton swab and a contrasting color to "paint" in the details you want like nodes or sheath scars onto your new PVC bamboo.

If you do want to torch the nodes on watch the video below to see how to get the effect of the close parallel lines. The torch is very close to the surface of the pipe and I'm moving very quickly back and forth. This torch doesn't give the sharpest lines, but on others you may find that the flame can singe lines on either side of the mouth of the torch nozzle. After you get one burn mark in, work on another area and then come back or you'll ruin the details from heating up too much pipe. When you come back, slightly rotate the pipe and continue your marks. Repeat until you go all the way around.



I hope you have fun using these techniques to dress up your PVC enrichments for whatever critters you work with. And remember, they also have green fluorescent dye.