The battery in my Prius’s smart key was getting weak. How do you change the battery? First remove the physical key. Then hold the latch open and slide off the cover. Then unscrew the battery hatch, replace the battery, and reverse the procedure. Only the fob back would not slide off. The finger ridge is smooth, and not shaped properly for removing a cover that has ridden in pockets for the past four or five years. The cover is smooth, so there’s not enough friction for my thumb to push it open.
Solution? Duct tape. Apply a strip of tape to the cover, hold open the latch, and pull the cover off.
It’s been mentioned in recent threads that duct tape is actually illegal - that is, non-code - for sealing ducts. It hardens, falls off and results in separated ducts or leakage within a few years.
Real duct sealing tape is made from aluminum, with a 3M adhesive that will stick an M-1A tank to a teflon wall.
Except for the fact that gaffer’s tape is four times as expensive as regular gray duct tape. Hey, if someone else is buying it, I’ll use expensive gaffer’s tape, but if I’m buying it, I’ll tape my cables to the floor with bog-standard silver duct tape, four rolls for $10.99 from CostCo.
I have a silver car that’s kinda creaking along. (It runs well, but it’s NOT pretty.) Someone must’ve bumped me in a parking lot and the front bumper started to begin to detach. Before the Fella got a chance to fix it (and he did) I silver duct taped it on. I carried a pair of scissors and a roll in the car b/c it was the summer and it kept melting off. It was a good stopgap measure—and it matched!
What exactly is different about the two? I’ve almost always used gaffer’s tape (no photographer should be without some), but recently I ran out and was somewhere where I couldn’t find anything, so picked up some duct/duck tape. The main differences I see is that duct tape is a good bit thinner and glossy, as opposed to gaffer’s flat finish and heftier composition.
Hey, if I need a matte cloth tape to cover up shiny bits of my set, gaffer’s tape all the way. But if I just need to tape cables to the floor to keep people from tripping over them, gaffer’s tape is stupid expensive.
In theory, the adhesive on gaffer’s tape is less likely to transfer to surfaces, but I have not had any problem with the gray Nashua “Industrial Grade Duct Tape” that I just bought from CostCo yesterday. It cost me $5.99 for two 60 yard rolls. And seriously, I’m taping cables to the floor in bars, and the adhesive of my duct tape is the kindest thing to happen to those floors all week.
Duck/duct tape is fine all around, but when we have a special visitor, I have to set up some electreonics in very high class hotels and other venues, so the gaffer’s tape is what we use on those ocassions, as the adhesive doesn’t lift off the gilt, or lacquer or fancy flocking.
I knew a girl in high school who made a pair of flipflops almost entirely out of duct tape. She started with a thin (think cereal box) cardboard cutout of each foot and built up enough layers of duct tape to make them a bit over half an inch thick.