Generally in life, when you are shopping around for an item it’s easy to distinguish why you would purchase ‘Product A’ over ‘Product B’.  It may be made with better materials, it may be lighter in construction or a whole magnitude of other reasons depending on what the item is.

When it comes to double sided adhesive tape and foam products, noticing a difference is much more difficult.  Of course your attention will be drawn if you are purchasing a product for £1.00 per roll and a visually identical product is put under your nose at £0.50.  You need to first think, is my application critical?

If you are sticking two pieces of light paper together with no exposure of heat, UV or moisture then this isn’t really a critical application.  However, we know that most applications involve some sort of stipulation of the requirement of the tape, perhaps it will be adhered to a flexible plastic where then the type of adhesive which is required then comes into play.

A good example and one that we are seeing more and more often is the construction of Anti Hot Spot Tape.  The makeup of this includes a fixed PE film which is adhered to the non-adhesive side of the polyethylene foam.  The film is bonded using a solvent acrylic adhesive which has the properties where it is UV resistant and is excellent in high temperatures.

If the product is constructed using a hot melt adhesive instead of an acrylic adhesive then the performance of the AHST is seriously compromised.  A hot melt adhesive has very poor resistance to UV and the temperature range is also much lower.

It can take a long while for the AHST to fail….but once it does attempting to replace faulty material can be a costly and very time consuming job.

At PAL we pride ourselves in having an onsite laboratory so materials can be analysed accurately and we can therefore offer the closest possible alternative.