A Sticky Situation: Part 2
No commentsFor those of you who are absolutely clueless as to what’s going on, I’m testing the stickiness of different brands of duct tape. Why? To determine which brand I’m going to use when testing out the ever-popular (yet admittedly stupid) method of leg waxing using duct tape.
I covered the details of the experiment in the last blog entry I wrote, but basically to sum it up, I sent a marble down a ramp (or rather, in this case, a tube) and the stickier the tape, the shorter the distance it traveled.
On to the actual experiment this time…
I did a total of 12 trials for each brand of tape and threw out both the highest and the lowest results. Then I averaged the remaining 10 results. Comparing these final averages to each other would work just fine to determine the stickiest tape out of the bunch, but ideally I’d like to replicate the experiment in the future and possibly on different equipment. If I stuck with the measurements I had recorded (distance in centimeters) they would be rendered useless in comparison to any results using a different ramp or type of marble. For that very reason, I devised my own method of measuring stickiness.
Basically I started by calculating the distance the marble would travel without any tape. We’ll call this distance the control measurement. For each brand of tape, I would subtract their average distance from the control measurement, then divide the control distance by that result. The number I come up with will end up being converted into a percentage. This percentage represents the distance the marble did not travel as a result of the friction caused by the stickiness of the tape. So basically the percentage I end up with gives us a value that can be interpreted across different experiments; the closer the percentage is to 100, the stickier the tape is. A tape with 100% stickiness would travel 0cm while a tape with 0% stickiness would travel as if there were no tape at all (the control measurement). I hope this explanation wasn’t too complicated or confusing. Rest assured, it works.
Simply put, in summary: the closer the value is to 100%, the stickier the tape.
So on to the results!
| Brand of Tape | Length of Roll (m) | Price per Roll | Price per Meter | Store | Avg. Distance (cm) | Stickiness % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3M All-Purpose Duct Tape | 50.2m | $5.57 | $0.11 | Lowe’s | 13.08cm | 93.795% |
| Staples Duct Tape | 60m | $6.99 | $0.12 | Staples | 5.78cm | 97.258% |
| Intertape Brand | ? | ? | ? | n/a | 5.15cm | 97.557% |
| Frost King Plastic Coated Cloth Duct Tape | 9.2m | $1.00 | $0.10 | Dollar Tree | 10.52cm | 95.009% |
| Scotch Multi-Use Duct Tape | 10m | $1.98 | $0.20 | Tractor Supply Co. | 24.01cm | 88.61% |
Surprisingly enough, my winner was the one I found lying around the house! Guess I didn’t have to do this whole thing after all. I’d follow with the customary “lol” if it hadn’t cost me $30. Oh well, guess I have more duct tape than I know what to do with!
You have to admit though, Scotch kind of let us all down. It was the lowest scoring brand I tested, yet it had to have been the most well recognized brand in the lineup. Not to mention it was the most expensive per yardage (at least at the store I went to).
Now that the experiment is done and over with, it’s about time to bite the bullet and rip the hair out of my legs! Check back again tomorrow to see how it all turns out.
Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 8:18 am and is filed under Battle of the Brands, Experiments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
