Many moons ago I worked in a department store that had a huge hardware department. Our biggest seller was, you guessed it, duct tape. Although it comes in colors, the lion’s share of our stock was a silver/gray color. We’d even run out of silver, the stuff was so popular.
So today, I see a silver car in our parking lot. The man has duct taped the hatch to his gas-cap closed. Guess what color he used? Red. I feel like going home to get some normal tape and replacing his hack-job with silver he “deserves”.
I have duct tape of various colors and patterns at the house. I try to do most of my repairs with the leopard print tape, or if that isn’t handy I have New England Patriots tape that goes with anything.
BBob, some people have absolutely no sense of style. Sad, but true. Wouldn’t the Mythbuster’s duct tape boat have been better if they’d used, say, yellow DT? Or blue? Whatta ya gonna do?
I got some camo duct tape that I used to wrap presents with at Christmas. From what I have seen most of the “duct” tape today is not really for ducts. The really good stuff was gray with sort of a fine mesh (maybe cloth?) in it. It came in rolls with a smaller center… not rolls with an extremely large center which makes you think you are getting way more than you are. When I was in the military, we used it for temporary repairs on airplanes. We called it ordnance tape.
Maybe somebody uses it to hold sailplanes together too. Photo. Note the tape on the wing under the pilot’s raised arm.
(Actually, it’s just there to cover the gap between the wing and the fuselage, to make the plane more streamlined. With gliders, that matters. But gee, look how un-smooth it is – totally defeats the purpose. They make special gap-tape for that (resembles white electrical tape, but it actually sticks). The duct tape I saw on some of the gliders there looked to be years old, sitting out in the sun, all dried out and cracked and crumbling. Anyway, it isn’t really holding the wings on.)(As far as I know.)
I used it to fix something unique this weekend…me!
I was doing an ultramarathon & got a blister on my heel. Given that it was in the 90°s & humid, the Band-Aids wouldn’t stick to my wet skin. They had neon duct tape. Put a new Band-Aid on then wrapped duct tape over it & my ankle; sock on, shoe on, & went for another 9 miles on it (until the end of the race).
When I bought my house, my dad presented me with a housewarming gift: a small toolbox, a few rolls of duct tape and a large can of WD-40. He joked one or the other will fix pretty much anything. He didn’t lie - one or the other has provided repairs numerous times.
Whippersnapper! I’m told it was called “90 MPH tape” at one time, I always heard it as “Hunnerd mile an hour tape”.
We used it a lot in the .mil, the contract supplier switched at one point, and the new stuff was much inferior. It wouldn’t stick to anything. I came very close to writing a nastygram to the supplier, sort of amusing looking back at it, but I’m sure they were getting a great price and all, no reason to rip off the gubbmint.
I’ve always been a big proponent of using gaffer’s tape instead of duct tape. Things just seem more solid when they’re fixed with gaffer’s. Plus, if you pull it off it doesn’t leave any residue and it’s much more heat resistant.
But I’m starting to think that I formed that opinion only because:
A) I’ve used high-quality gaffer’s tape and shitty duct tape
B) I work in the TV / Film / Music industries and gaffer’s is more appropriate for many of our needs
C) When I’ve used it for other reasons I also wanted the properties of gaffers tape over the properties of duct tape (heat resistance and no residue)
I can’t shake my strong preference for gaffer’s but I now think I need to find some really high quality duct tape for anything that I need to hold permanently.
I generally prefer gaffer myself, as I’m a photographer, so I always have it around. It’s a good bit pricier than duct tape, though. I do seem to find duct tape to be stickier and hold tighter, but usually, I prefer the convenience of gaffer tape and its removal.
