this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
6 points (58.8% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35800 readers
1326 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago

It's gray to blend in with sheet metal ducting. there's really no reason it has to be gray though, with plenty of brands offering other colors or patterns. It's just tradition at this point- you expect duct tape to be gray, so they make it gray.

What makes duck or duct tap duct tape is that it's a pressure sensitive adhesive, with a fabric backing and some kind of plastic layer to "waterproof" it, as well as a fabric that's woven in such a way as to be tearable by hand (and not shears, like other fabric tapes of the time.)

this form was originally developed during WW2 as a means of sealing ammo cans for the war, and was the army's olive drab in color.

it switched to gray in color after WW2 when it became common to use it to wrap/seal air ducts.

As for why it sticks to everything better than "normal" tape, it depends on what you mean by "normal" tape. If you mean cellophane-packed tape (the clear plastic stuff, typically called scotch tape or packing tape), it doesn't actually. It just has more adhesive (which is impregnated into the fabric backing). the adhesive is actually (basically) the same pressure sensitive stuff. That is to say, the adhesive in the tape is activated by applying pressure to the tape; rather than a solvent that evaporates off (like glues, CA, Elmers, etc).

If you mean something like masking or painter's tape, or gaffer's tape, it's because the tape is designed with a different adhessive and these are meant to be temporary.

also, just for the record, magnets would only stick to ferromagnetic materials (stuff that contains iron, basically.) but there's no adhesive involved. If you made a simple electromagnet by wrapping wire around an iron/steel nail, and touching the wire to a battery's terminals, when you turn it off it would stop being attracted to things and just pop off.