packaging tapes

If you just need definitions:

Tack is stickiness.

Shear refers to strength parallel to the tape -- it's usually much higher than peel strength.

Peel is the strength resisting peeling: pulling more or less perpendicular to the run of tape. When this is measured, a drum is usually rolled along, pulling the tape up.

Wouldn't peel also depend on the material it was stuck to. So, for instance, if the tape was on crappy corrugated cardboard, the tape might come up, but would take a lot of cardboard with it. Essentially, measuring the strength of the cardboard rather than the tape.

And who the hell stays up nights worrying about tape!!! Tapeologists?! Packologists?! And if so, can they explain to me those flat, black disks that have started showing up in my packing peanuts?!

Wouldn't peel also depend on the material it was stuck to.

Yup. Such things need to be specified in the peel test.

I used to stay up at night worrying about this stuff as it applies to composites. Interlaminate failures can occur in (adhesive) shear, or peel, etc. I can't bring myself to get really excited about this stuff, but adhesive tape is actually very poorly understood for being such a common thing. It's only fairly recently that we've begun to understand how geckos walk upside down on ceilings (turns out there is a force associated with the money made by insurance companies that enables this phenomenon).

If you have flat black discs in your packaging material, it means that you are under surveillance as a possible terrorist. But you have nothing to fear (unless you are one of those sickos who has thoughts that are out of synch with those of Dubbya).

See, the thing you don't realize is that we were invaded quite a few years ago... It was around the time that packing peanuts appeared on the scene. Turns out that packing peanuts ARE aliens. They just let themselves be used that way because they like to travel and they don't like spending money. At night, however, in dark shipping departments all over the world, they open their eyes, get up, and hatch their evil plans for the next day.

Now bubble-wrap, on the other hand! Woof!!! You don't even want to know about what's up with that!!!

V,

you are wrong. everybody knows that the aliens are undiscernible cellular masses piloting dragonfly ships.

Unless you are referring to the more political aliens. Those of the nationwide alien-retaining fence variety.

Burma!!!

shave

I panicked!

Picnic?!

I love picnics. Hated the musical. Couldn't eat on the floor.

Did I just post that out loud?

A clarification: the sheer strength usually measured in adhesive tapes is the sheer strength of the adhesive, not that of the tape itself. Sheer strength is the resistance to slipping of one surface past another.

I have a one page "measuring adhesion" form I can fax you that offers the information you requested. Send me your contact information including fax number.

Gary gking@specialtytapes.net