On The Trail of A Good Floor Marking Tape

For several years we offered our customers a tape called SafeOff for use in temporary layout of gym floors. Lots of school and college gyms have to accommodate a lot of sports and you can only paint so many courts on a floor before no one can tell where they are supposed to play.  Temporary floor tape was the solution.
SafeOff was advertised as having an adhesive that would not damage the floor when removed, and it served our customers well for a while. Unfortunately, as schools migrated from oil-based to water-based polyurethane for floor finishing, SafeOff did not keep up. Consequently, several of our customers who refinished with the new product suffered floor damage when removing the tape. This was embarrasing for us and caused some real problelms for these schools.

Attempts to work out this problem with the manufacturer went no where, so we had to drop the tape.

Apparently the only other tape that had been approved by the US Volleyball Assoc., a 3M product, was dropped by the manufacturer.  It was a type of safe release tape intended for painters, and 3M apparently didn’t think that the floor marking tape business was worth supporting.

We’ve continued to try to find a solution, working with a number of volleyball coaches, as well aus USA Volleyball.  We hope that we finally have a solution.

The product is Shurtape 724 (formerly Permacel 724), a tape that we have sold for years, primarily for temporary labelling of sound and lighting equipment.  It has an adhesive that is described as “repositionable”, meaning that it can be cleanly removed from a piece of equipment and then put back on.  It comes up clean and the adhesive is aggressive enough to stick to a smooth, clean floor, but not so sticky that it brings up the floor finish when its removed.

We’ve put samples into the hands of a number of former SafeOff customers and hope that they can confirm the results of our early tests.  Check back here to see how things work out.

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