The Difference....

between old and new...

I opened up my brand spanking new snap press dyes yesterday, very exciting for me, as snapping has been at a stand still lately due to having a dodgy (or worn out as you will see below) socket dye.

I get asked often how you can tell if your snap press dye set has worn out. So I thought I would be informational for once and give you a looksie at old versus new. I will note before hand that the old dye set is black and the new shiny and silver, that is not part of the wearing out, the old one was black when I got it.

For those of you familiar with snap presses, you will have already figured out that this is the socket dye. The pokey outey bit (oh yeah I make up words as I go too!) has the socket piece snapped onto it and then the cap is placed in the base part then you squish them together and that forms the socket piece. (on a piece of fabric of course!) 

You will notice on my dye that looking at it from the side (right side) the old dye has lost alot of its squishyness, making the snap press more likely to break the snap due to it being too hard a force pushed onto it (this is my assumption by the way) I know the lack of squishyness has made a difference in the rate of breaking snaps. There is not alot of difference in the size of the part that the snap sits on, but on my last worn out dye set, it was half the size of the new one! 

With things like metal (I am now chanelling my boilermaking partner!) things as small as 0.3 of a millimetre can make a massive difference, so its really important to make sure you change your dye set, otherwise your snaps really wont be as well put in as they should be. You will also notice on the picture on the left that there is an indent around the part the snap sits on (its bigger in real life), this is from the snaps wearing down on it.

Here is the stud dye set. There is not a massive amount of difference here. For me, because I make nappies, for every 10 sockets I do only 4 studs so they really don't wear out as quickly. I do change both dye sets at the same time though. Its a habit. You will notice that there is a small amount of wear on the old stud dye in the photo on the right, the part in the centre of the hole the stud sits in is starting to push in, in the last one I changed, once again, there was a larger difference due to wear.

The main things to look out for to decide if your dye needs a change or not are...

1. Breaking a lot of snaps. I always know its time to change my dye set when I break more than 2 snaps per nappy on a regular basis. 

2. Your snap doesn't clip onto the dye very well any more. A sure sign that the parts they are meant to clip onto are wearing a lot.

I'm sure there are more, but these are the main things I have noticed. 

I hope this has been information filled for you. If you have anything to add to my info please add it in the comments :) I'm by no means an expert, just recalling my personal experience.

For the record too, I always buy my new snap press dyes from here.