On this episode of Tale of the Tape, Matt Tempelis discusses the importance of replacing adhesives, mechanical fasteners, rivets, and welds with tape most notably 3M’s VHB Foam tape.
Transcript:
Hello and welcome, to another episode of Tale of Tape. I'm Matt Tempelis, President of Engineered Materials and your Minister of Tape. Today, I'd like to talk about, replacing mechanical fasteners, rivets, welds, as well as adhesive technologies with tape. Do you know that for over 45 years, engineers have been leveraging tape to replace all these different fastening devices? The most common tape used to do this is acrylic foam tape, most notably 3M VHB™ Foam Tape. They invented and came to market with this technology in 1980, and there are still people and engineers that do not know about acrylic foam tape and VHB. You could save time, you can use differential materials, you can use lighter weight substrates, and you can design things that you hadn't imagined. If you leverage foam tape instead of using differential fasteners. VHB foam tape is a viscoelastic acrylic foam that has adhesive, high powered adhesive laminated to each side of that foam. It creates very high strength bonds that are excellent at absorbing dynamic loads. And there are products that can bond to nearly any substrate. Let's take a look at VHB Acrylic Foam Tape bonds up close. 3M VHB™ Acrylic Foam Tape comes in 48 inch wide rolls that we can slip. Two specific roles for your need. It comes with a polyethylene or a paper release liner. As you'll see here, it is a very viscoelastic product. This is the RP+060 which is 25 mil product. Obviously you make the bond and peel the liner if you want it to be produced into specific tape parts.
As you can see here, we can do that to exact application needs. Here's a great example of a couple of tape parts that we have here in house. But because it comes in wide webs and has a variety of liners and we can replace liners, we can make it into pretty much any tape part for your application needs. The 3M pull tab is a great example of how 3M Acrylic Foam Tape differs from your typical tape. Here you have a acrylic VHB tape. Here you have a polyethylene foam tape. So it's polyethylene, probably about a 6lb polyethylene with adhesive laminated on either side. Here you have VHB, they're both probably near 32 mil thick products. If I peel hard enough with my fingers, I can rip right through that polyethylene foam. If you look at the VHB bond now, you can see how it wants to move with the force that I'm placing on it, and then go right back to its original form. That's that viscoelasticity and the ability to deal with dynamic stress. If you try really hard, you could rip that VHB apart. I probably can't anymore. It's awfully hard. You can see it really loves to absorb stress, but a great example for why VHB is great for replacing mechanical fasteners, rivets, and adhesives. Just a stronger tape. 3M has a variety of great demo tools to show the design, flexibility, capabilities, and overall strength of 3M VHB™ products.
Here's a great one. It's the classic I-beam. It's bonded with a 45 mil 4950 3M Acrylic Foam Tape VHB™. And if you go online and search, you can find big, strong men that tried to bend and break this VHB bond. And what inevitably they end up doing is bending the I-beam and not breaking the tape. There is no way at my age that I can do this, because I know when I started in 1995 with 3M VHB™, I couldn't break it then, not going to break it now. Another great demo tool is called the Hockey Puck. Of course we're in Minnesota, we got to call it the hockey puck. It shows the sealing capabilities of Acrylic Foam Tapes. You can see here that we have the 3M 5952 45 mil formable VHB™ tape bonding to polycarbonate within that polycarbonate hockey puck that's bonded on both sides with VHB. We have just a red dyed water, but it shows that you have got a great bond. Right you have a great bond. Plus, you have a water tight seal. We've discussed replacing mechanical fasteners, rivets, welds, and adhesives with acrylic foam tape. If you have any questions about 3M VHB™ products, making it into parts or have an application, please reach out to Engineered Materials. We'll see you next time on Tale of the Tape.
