it’s 2023 but why isn’t there any strong adhesives that won’t damage the paint when ripping them off?

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Painters tape can hardly handle any weight, you deal with stubborn residues and damaged paint with Blu tacks, same with most tapes out there. Why is it so challenging to create something paint-safe and yet strong enough to hold some weight?

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5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because in the end, this isn’t really a problem with the tape, but rather the paint itself.

We can either attach something strongly to the paint, but then the weakest link becomes the wall-paint connection, so the paint gets ripped off. Or you can attach the tape so loosely, that the paint-tape connection is the weakest link. But then it has to be weaker than the paint-wall connection, so it can’t support a lot of force.

It’s like hanging a hook on a thin thread and asking, why there is no special hook so we can hang a lot more stuff on it. The hook is not the limiting factor.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Paint is an adhesive in and of itself. If you were to have colored drywall and no reason to paint it then you could use an adhesive that would hold some weight.

You can also try getting better paint and see if that helps.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There is, actually. It’s called stretch release tape. I’ve only seen it used for mounting LCD panels in laptops, though.

The tape consists of very stretchy rubber with adhesive on both sides, and you need to leave a small tab exposed which can be grabbed when it’s time to release it. Pulling on this tab stretches the tape to many times its length, and the point where it starts to stretch loses adhesion. As you slowly pull it out from under the glued object, eventually all of it becomes detached.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Holding some weight means not letting go of the wall.

But the wall is covered in paint. So what you are realy asking for here is something that won’t let go of the paint.

But you also want to separate it from the wall. So you pull on it until something comes free.

You specifically designed the hanger to hold onto the paint very strongly. But you said nothing about the paint holding onto the wall strongly. And something has to give. So the paint comes off the wall.

What you really seem to be after here is stronger paint.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You want your adhesive to be **really sticky** so it can hold weight without coming off the wall.

You also want your adhesive to be **not sticky** (only very slightly) so that paint doesn’t stick to it when you remove it.

You see the problem? The reason painters tape only sticks a little is because you *want* it to only hold its own weight (plus whatever paint gets on it). That way you minimize the risk of any paint sticking to it and coming off when you remove the tape.

Things can’t be simultaneously very sticky and not very sticky (at least not to the same material, i.e. the painted surface). But there is a solution to this that has been mentioned elsewhere ITT: you can make an adhesive that is very sticky to begin with, but can be turned into a less sticky material. One way to do this is by making it stretchy. If your adhesive can normally support, say, 100 grams per cm^(2), then when you stretch it out, the same adhesive strength is now spread out over a larger area, meaning that at any given point, it sticks to things less strongly.