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Comment by exmadscientist | Hacker News Reader

A most inferior list. It's got trademarked versions of ordinary kinds of tape, but not my favorite tape: glass cloth tape.

Glass cloth tape, such as 3M 361 https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/b40068300/ , is remarkable stuff. It is, ironically, a much better tape for ducts than duct tape. It is also the only tape approved for use in Antarctic intermittent duty hot water systems, which have to swing from -40°C to +100°C and back. Daily. ("Approved for use" meaning here "doesn't fail right away".) It's not an all-purpose tape (especially not once you see the price), but nothing else can do what it can.

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It's also missing Z-tape. Double sided sticky tape that only electrically conducts in the z-axis. Great for where you would traditionally solder a component to a PCB but you don't want it to be a permanent fixture. https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/b10167835/

What is the canonical coordinate system of a roll of tape?

Rolled or unrolled?

A small wad, after getting stuck to itself and an unsuccessful attempt at separating it, that is now stuck to one of your fingers no matter how hard you attempt to flick it off.

You have to know these things when you are a king.

Unroll the tape on your right index finger, starting from where your thumb meets your index. That's the origin. Your thumb points along the positive Z direction. Your index points along y, and x is your middle finger points along x.

Fascinating! Seems like that could be an effective way for hobbyists to attach BGA components to a PCB without a reflow oven - any idea if that’s been tried?

From the datasheet linked there, it looks like the minimum recommended spacing to ensure electrical isolation between adjacent conductors is 15 mil (0.4mm). In an example I found here [1], the pitch between BGA pins is 0.5 mm to 1.0 mm, with pad sizes roughly half of the pitch. So it looks like for the larger pitches, it might just work. 3M also says they'll do custom tape with better isolation, but that might just be more expensive than a reflow oven.

[1] https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/application-note/AN10778.pdf

It has been tried and doesn't work very well, even for low-density pinouts:

https://tomverbeure.github.io/2019/11/21/Z-tape.html

I’d say one of the most interesting jobs in my social orbit is a friend who works in material sciences for 3M - while it’s not all “Eureka” moments he does a lot of fun work trying to solve specific problems with the products 3M sells. The real interesting stuff he talks about is in the oddly specific use cases.

Might I suggest adding it to the list then in addition to this comment? You seem to know more than just "it exists" since you cite use cases and advantages.

Be the change you want to see.

I believe that list is of sufficiently low quality that it cannot be improved incrementally. But instead of saying that, I offered the most interesting tape I know.

Additionally, I categorically refuse to edit Wikipedia any longer. Its culture is toxic and I will not trade my precious sanity to further entrench it.

The problem isn't that the list is incomplete. It's that the endeavor is poorly conceived.

You can names tapes by their intended use, or by their adhesive properties, or by the material of the substrate, etc. Depending on what naming scheme you use, you get different lists. Look at 3M's list of tapes [0], for example. Their tape names don't match those on the wikipedia page, because they're named after intended use. The wiki page uses all strategies simultaneously. For example, they have a category called "foil tapes", which includes the wiki page's "aluminum tape" as a subcategory. The wiki page has "scotch tape", ironically a brand owned by 3M, which doesn't even appear on the 3M page (presumably they fall under that page's "office tapes" category).

I'm not just nit-picking about naming. I'm saying the list is arbitrary because it resolve hash collisions arbitrarily.

[0] https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/c/tapes/

Another collision is "magnetic tape", one being adhesive and the other storing data. They indicate the former but the photo is of the latter.

Agreed. it is lacking. Where is the stationary washi tape?

Related is book binding tape. And matte tape used to hinge picture mattes and mount pictures to a matte

> , a much better tape for ducts than duct tape.

Duct tape was never meant for ducts.

What's the price?

About $120 for a standard-masking-tape size roll (1in x 60yd): https://www.zoro.com/3m-cloth-tape-1-in-x-60-yd-75-mil-white...

The same-brand same-size roll of actual masking tape is $5: https://www.zoro.com/scotch-blue-masking-tape-blue-1-in-x-60...

As my great grandmother used to say ”It’s the user not the wiki.”

Add your knowledge of tapes to the list and make this an excellent list by your own standards and add to the joy and collective success of the human species.

And watch it get reverted 5 minutes later.

Did that happen?

I can’t imagine there is some troll guarding the Wikipedia tape list who doesn’t want an accurate list.

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