I mentioned in the "black with purple legs" thread that the colors in a pic I posted were all re-melts. They are indeed. But what I want to mention is the purple. Its a X2 color.
I've got a bunch of the X2 colors now and I have had a chance to play with several. Purple, chartreuse, hot orange and hot pink have seen more of my attention than any others combined because I focus mostly on small baits. I have made an interesting observation in using them that I'll pass along here.
In mixing batches of the X2 in the 4 colors mentioned I try to keep the colors on the transparent side and often that is hard to do. The colorants are simply so bold that the color itself overwhelmes the transparency. I think it has something to do with the pigments used to make the colors so strong with so little color being added to the raw plastic. When I want a real transparent yet strong color I go to my re-melt bags and start with a chunk having what I want in the batch at hand...meaning the used color has the glitter(s), hi lite, etc already in it, and chunk it up using enough of it to make up about 2/3 of the batch size I want, then add raw plastic to complete the volumn. I add stabilizer to this and give it a stir. Then I heat this mix in increments until I hit the magic 350 and allow the plastic to cool about 10 degrees and do my shooting, trying to keep the cup between 330 and 340 most ofthe time. When heat is needed I give shots of about 10 seconds to maintain the level of heat I want. The purple in the other posts pic of the small fry I added there is a prime example of the crystal clear type of transparency I like in most colors and this process is exactly how I attain this beautiful transparency.
This process is not likely to work all too well for those using very large batch quantities, but for those who like to shoot in the four to 8 ounce range, attaining color clarity like this is all yours to work with. Its simple and basically means you just have to slow down a notch. Why cutting an "already cooked" color using the X2 colorants seems to help make more transparent is something I don't quite understand but I am convinced it has something to do with the additional cooking or re-heating. The purple in that pic has been re-heated/re-melted a bunch of times and in fact was heated and used in a different bait the morning I saw the other thread. The small fry colors shown are more transparent and clear.
Maybe it the repeated cooking of the colorant's pigments. Maybe its the repeated dilution. Maybe its a thinning of the hi lite. Perhaps its finally getting the color to just the right point of dilution to allow transparency to really stand out. I don't know what it is, but I know for a fact that this system of re-heating ad re-melting of certain X2 colors makes them take to transparency a whole lot better than right out of the bottle mixes. I don't mean this as a problem, but rather a way to reach an end that hard to get to right out of the bottle in small batches.
