Vinyl Floor Marking Tape - You Get What You Pay For

Vinyl Floor Marking Tape - You Get What You Pay For

Vinyl floor marking tape, an industrial facility staple, comes in many varieties, with a wide spectrum of differences in color, toughness and the inclusion of many interesting additional features that are provided to cater to the special needs of warehouses and factories that deal with heavy human and mechanical traffic. Unfortunately, there are plenty of facility managers out there who, due to the obvious economic reason, figure that any vinyl tape they can get their hands on, for the lowest possible price, will be sufficient to fulfill their organizational and safety needs. After all, tape is tape, isn't it? So long as it can be cut into strips and laid out to form the boundaries, sections, passageways and storage markers that you can see on the average industrial floor, then it really doesn't matter which brand or grade you purchase. At least, that's what they think. vinyl plank flooring products

And then reality sets in, or rolls through, when a pallet being shoved over a vinyl line ends up ripping it apart, proving that the vinyl floor marking tape that one purchased simply was not appropriate for the job. Cheap tape may be fine for locations that do not involve any stepping, rolling or dragging over the marking lines, but for even mild traffic, you're really just wasting your money. Regular vinyl floor marking tape suffers from a number of deficiencies that simply make it unsuitable for a lot of the workplaces that need it.

The first problem is that of durability. Bargain vinyl tape is pretty flimsy, prone to ripping and tearing simply by holding a strip of it in your two hands and stretching. A little damage is all it takes for the entire line to warp and deteriorate very quickly. This is because a thin strip of plain vinyl does not have any reinforcement to speak of, no tough fiber spine or treated body that would make it more resistant to things that weigh as much as a car driving over them on a daily basis. It's no surprise that these tapes wear out almost as soon as they are laid down.

Another problem with conventional vinyl tape is that, due to the way it is manufactured, it tends to be raised slightly, which makes it easier for objects to catch on to the edges. Most vinyl floor marking tapes aren't produced as strips, but as sheets that are later on cut into strips, which is why they don't lay out as finely as you would prefer.

Lastly, vinyl tape adhesive is a lot like the underside of stickers, so that when you pull on a sticker quickly, bits of the adhesive, and in fact some of the sticker surface, is left behind. Regular vinyl adhesive is not strengthened with, say, a textile underlay that keeps the sticky substance together. As such, when you remove it from the floor, you end up having to scrape away lots of unpleasant residue.

Fortunately, there are grades of floor marking tape that do not suffer from any of these issues. But if you're only interested in keeping your costs down, don't say you haven't been warned, because you really will get only what you pay for.