Engineering Uses for Duct Tape

I'm subscribing to this because the potential is just... So great.

So true, I almost forgot about that.. A GA for sure, probably the best use for duct tape.

Best one I can think of besides some Red-Green episodes. :)

Yeah, Apollo 13, just what I was thinking. In case you haven't seen the NASA pix, I have these handy from a talk I gave on redneck engineering last month.

And this isn't duct tape but it could be.

And a nice pair of safety glasses.

Do a Google images search on "redneck engineering." You'll be sitting there for hours.

jhammond

Furniture:

Automotive:

Accountants headgear:

That's it, that is what I want to see....

Though I would like to hear of some personal uses from the CR4 community.

one of my main tools had always carry a roll in my carry along tool bag when travel to sites.

uses, well to name a few.

• hold a target panel in place when taking laser measurements. (Target gives a positive response when I tag it with the laser then I know I hit the right thing and not something else thats behind it or closer.
• hold things in place like the dumb end of a tape measure in tight spots
• rope it and used for temporary cording.
• emergency car repair when after you hit a deer, to get you on your way.

Sorry its not wild, crazy or cool, but with duct tape, "If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy."

now available on BETAMAX

I also carry a roll in my truck, have one in the bedroom, shed, garage, and in my desk at work. Never know when you'll need it....

reminds me of something else........ ^{personal protection}

I rather have one and not need it, than need one and not have it.

I would like to know what uses you have come up with in the bedroom???

You had to ask !

Duct tape in the Bedroom!?!?! Oh Quagmire!

This is one of those questions that is just best not asked.

I have a small tool box in the bedroom closet, that would be where the duct tape is...

Duct Tape Bikinis. Yowza.

and more uses

they all complain that they have nothing to wear.

That has got to hurt coming off. I'll stick with cotton.

I was moving some furniture for my son, and I'd covered the back of the pickup with a tarp held down by bungee cords. As soon as I got on the freeway I realized that was a bad idea - the bungee cord & tarp combination acted like a parachute. I got off at the next exit, drove to a Target and bought a roll of duct tape to hold the tarp down. I learned my lesson to use rope, not bungees.

By the way, there was quite a bit of residue from the duct tape glue left on my truck afterward. I found that the best thing to remove the glue was isopropyl alcohol.

There is a great Mythbusters show about duct tape. They used it for a wide variety of things, including a canoe that was more than adequately seaworthy.

That certainly has a hillbilly theme to it. GA from me.

Stick a piece over a wart, it is said to be better at removing them than anything specifically intended to do so.

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-204_162-525523.html

Well, personal experience here.Wart removal. I had a persistent wart on a finger. One day had a magnifying glass and noted that with this particular glass the focus would start a fire on a dark piece of paper faster than on a white sheet.

So, blackened the wart with a magic marker. Carefully kept the hot spot on the wart and moved it around. there was some signs of blood, but before a drop could form, the heat would cauterize it. I was able to PAINLESSLY heat the center til I started to feel the heat, and then move the spot around. After about 3 minutes I had gotten all the wart charred and flicked off. NO pain. Some smoke, and no bleeding. The blackened spot left was smaller than the wart and stuck a little band aid on it. Just for covering it up. About 2 or 3 days later took the band aid off and there was only some pink skin showing. CURED. No cost. no pain. No recurrance. Sure beat freezing. Never got another wart. Did a girlfriends wart on her neck a few years later and was easy, no pain and no recurrance or scar.

It's great for fixing a hole in your screens. Just put a piece on each side of the screen and stick then together. It keeps the bugs out until you can make a more permanent fix. It also can be used to hem you pants. Holds well until they go in the wash. Since it comes in colors now, you can fix rips in you car seats with it.

Oh I forgot, I use it to get cactus spines out of my fingers. Works great for that and slivers.

My daughter and her best friend swiped two rolls of my duct tape when they were about 12 years old and built a tree fort in a tree on a vacant lot. They both claimed they had no part in the missing rolls of tape until I saw the tree. Busted !!

I still wish I had taken pictures.

just an idea, why not engineer duct tape for specific appications?

They already do...

Havn't tried it yet, but if the insertion device is too soft, a wrap with some duct tape should stiffen it up . Add some wd-40 for extra slipperyness as needed.

Ozark wisdom.

looks like the best personal use so far, thanks for sharing....

Thanks JP. I like your duct tape baby sitter. My wife has done some baby sitting recently and it's probably a good thing she didn't see that beforehand or given the circumstances, she would have tried it.

The water slide took about three years to get right. First year we used a five foot wide piece of polyester organic photoconductor film scrap substrate 100 feet long. Incredibly slippery but I didn't give any thought to how rigid the edges were. Until one of the kids did a face plant at the end of the slide right on an edge and got a surgical grade cut that took a dozen stitches to close. Fortunately she was tough as nails (didn't even cry), the entire cut was in her eyebrow so what little scar there was wouldn't show, and her parents were fine people and didn't sue us.

Next year we switched to the polyethylene film, and extended it to 250 feet. At the speeds people were reaching, things would get pretty unstable near the bottom, and people were skidding off onto the grass where the abrupt change in shear rate tended to separate them from their flotation devices. Ungracefully.

Next spring I got our heaviest tractor out and ran it up and down the hill when the ground was soft, mashing a small flume in the ground. (Two actually - could have set up parallel slides and had races.) That did the trick. Next year we built the receiver hitch Rube Goldberg contraption for rolling and unrolling.

Sadly though, this was all at my Mom's place where I grew up - she passed away a year ago, and we sold her home this past summer. But I still have all of the hardware... I just need to find a new friend who has a pond on a hillside or a big waterfront yard.

My one regret is that I didn't come up with this while I was still in engineering school. For obvious reasons.

jhammond

We all should remember the only two tools needed for any project repair is a roll of duct tape and a hammer...Used them both to mend a broke universal joint on my pickup. Lasted 6 miles and home.

I repaired a radiator hose on the road with it.

I taped a large magnet to an old axe handle to pick up nails and screws in the yard.

Mythbusters made a bridged comprised entirely of duct tape and it worked.

Always wondered where that name came from.

Wrap it backwards (sticky side out) over one hand and use it pick off the thousands of little seed ticks after a hike through the weeds.

A bit hard on body hair, but it gets those buggers off.

I can not think of anywhere that it has not been used. Ironically the last place you should use it is on duct work.

Duct tape is an excellent in the field band-aid.

Do not leave home with out it.

I like to put a wrap of tape on poly or nylon rope before cutting, it stops the ends from fraying.

For nylon rope I just use a lighter and melt the end a little.

It's a permanent solution.

Iditarod dog sled race requires 2 rolls as standard equipment on every dogsled.

Society For Creative Anachronism (SCA) uses duct tape to hold foan rubber padding on all of their competition weapons.

I've used it to temporarily fix coolant hoses on cars and cover badly dented sheet metal until it could be repaired and hold trunk lids in place after being rear ended.

Brest augmentation in a roll...

And also, at work, a small piece of duct tape is used to protect the S/N on titanium forgings while chemical milling.

I found these, let's hope CPS and ASPCA doesn't see them.

Duct Tape Babysitter :

And the Duct tape broke kitty fixer :

Sorry Del......

I read an article somewhere on travelling on the cheap. They suggested that you should always carry a roll of duct tape to tape your room closed at night: it wouldn't stop someone getting in but it makes enough noise to wake you.

I often use duct tape (or any other tape) to make a handle for a hacksaw blade when the space is too tight to get a proper hacksaw in.

I am a Chief Election Officer for the state of Virginia (USA) and fill in as CE Officer at out of the way locations as needed. I was assigned a couple of years ago to a school facility that had no outside door handles in the room we were using. Since voters couldn't come THROUGH the school (not allowed, and yes, the school admins are hostile to the election process), I was expected to post someone next to the door to open it whenever someone knocked (middle of winter, snow on the ground, temps around freezing, windy, blowing snow most of the day, couldn't leave the door open). To top it off, even if there were an outside handle, the doors latched with no key access from outside.

I made a handle with the lower band of the handle also being used to block the door's striker from making contact. The first one lasted from about 0500 to about 1030, and the second, from then till the election team left about 2200 hours that night (I guess the second design improved on the first). I HAD photos I took of the handle, but can't find them now. I'm often asked by other election officers if I have them, and can they see them? If I find them, and there is any interest, I'll post them here.

I've also seen duct tape used as skin on an aircraft with success.

Pilots I know used to call it 100 Mile an hour tape, but whenever I asked if they'd ever tried it on anything faster than a 100MPH plane, they wouldn't give me a straight answer. But in reality, what flies slower than, or at 100MPH now? Even the OV-1, and OV-10 FAC planes in Viet Nam did better than that. I suspect, in a pinch, it has covered patches and secured loose panels at upwards of a couple hundred MPH, though I wouldn't find a lot of comfort in it if the panel was a)critical, b)heavy, c)could break something important on its way out or d)would seriously off-balance the plane if it departed in flight. That would be one flight I'd like to miss.

What fly slower than 100 mile per hour?..........

What's the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

would that be an European or African swallow?

All sailplanes do. Most of the Pipers do. There are many private aircraft whose stall speed is much below 100 mph.

yep! used it to cover a hole in an A-6E Intruder so we could get it home and fix it right. Landing speed was something like 120 knots, and usually flew around 600+. tape was still there when we got her home.

Alright!! Good story about one of my favorite planes. The only one I liked better was the EA-6B Prowlers (YEP, I'm an inveterate Navy GEEK. And loving every minute of it.) But the best thing about those birds was their Iron Hand ops. Sucker the radar online, then stick a spike in it, all the while dodging flying phone poles. Tough job, but admirably done.

Like ya'll did not see this coming...

For the Linux group.

Making a vintage dress form. After its finished you cut

up the back slip it off then fill in and put on a wooden dress

form. You then have a custom size form.

My mother in law and father in law. She was not a great driver, and he was not a mechanical engineer. The rear quarter panel got caved in from a close encounter. He looked at it and taped a feather pillow into the dent. Then stretched the remainder of the roll of duct tape over it to smooth it out. Then got matching color paint and finished the job.

I just knew that one day there would be another fender bender, and everyone would be looking for the dead birds.

I have used duct tape to make a handle to carry four 6 Volt rechargeable batteries, and also hold them together. For the handle, fold back some tape to cover the sticky part, and run the rest under the batteries. Now wrap duck tape around, and you have a completed unit (no metal case required). It worked great.

Wouldn't that be a battery?

Hmmm... Hold on while I get Red Green on the phone. "Harold, Is your screwy uncle there"...

And yet the baggage handlers still manage to steal stuff!!!

NOT a TSA Approved locking method.

Like the old saying describes you only need two tools,

"If it moves and it shouldn't --Duct Tap.

If it does not move and it should --WD-40."

Not as good as my water slide (post#22) but another use. Wife is between sizes in workouts with her kettlebells. 15lb too light, 20lb too heavy. 8kg (17.6lb) too expensive.

Made a couple of weight belts out of BBs and good sticky duct tape and fastened them to a 15lb KB with adhesive backed Velcro. Now 17.2lb.

jhammond