The Law of Unintended Consequences

I’m not a chemist (don’t even play one on tv), but a phone call from a prospective customer yesterday had me thinking about how little attention I paid in high school chemistry.

The stage manager for a well known Chicago dance company was having a tape problem that I had never come across before. They were cleaning their vinyl dance floor with isoproply alcohol and had begun to have problems with gaffers tape adhesive delaminating from the tape backing. This had been their cleaning protocol for a long time but something in the adhesive’s interaction with the cleaning agent had changed. They had tried both Permacel 665 and Pro Gaffer and had encountered the same problem with both products.

Both of these popular cloth tapes use the same synthetic rubber adhesive, so I was not surprised that both tapes were having the same problem. What was a surprise was that this seemed to be a new problem. Perhaps something in the adhesive chemistry had changed.

Dance companies like squeaky clean floors and spend a lot of time and money to provide a surface that lets the dancers move seamlessly while still getting enough grip to maintiain balance. Having the cleaning solution that you have used successfully for years suddenly start leaving tape goo on the floor makes a lot of necessary work for stage techncians. Technicians who are too busy already.

The manufacturing process for making gaffers tape is complicated and there are lots of possibilities for unpredictable interactions between the tape adhesive, its release coat, and the surface to which it is applied. A roll of tape is not as simple as it looks.

I did’t have an answer or a solution for her, but we’ll dig a little deeper. Check back here to see what we come up with.

Meanwihile, if you have a tough tape adhesive removal problem, you might want to try M1 Adhesive Remover. It does a great job of removing adhesives.

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