Clever uses for blue painter's tape around the shop (and house)

Thanks for the explanation. But why? Why do we want two bits of wood temporarily glued together in a manner that specifically needs to be stronger than a loop of tape?

CNC fixturing is challenging. You want to hold something very strongly but very temporarily, and in a way that gives complete access to the top surface of the material. In woodworking, this tape trick works well there. In a machine shop, it isn’t strong enough for most jobs, but is still sometimes used for light cuts in aluminum, or for hand work like filing or drilling. Otherwise we resort to carbide tipped biting side clamps, and other shenanigans. These are all for situations where mechanical fasteners can’t be used for clearance reasons (which comes up a lot more than you might think).

I’ve not personally seen a use case for this trick outside of those specific CNC and machine shop situations, but there may be others.

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Ok, thanks. (But I have never used a CNC or seen one in the flesh.)

Can I use blue masking tape to mark off the point where I want to start watching?

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That’s a great tip, thanks! I’ve run into that leaking/bleeding problem before, and am about to embark on a whole new set of reno, so very timely.

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Also useful to precisely cut and finish two or more pieces by hand or machine where a clamp would get in the way.

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Dunno if I can agree with that… 2090 and a sharpie leaves multi year durable marks when we use it in our production facility for labeling bins, albeit in a relatively oil free environment. The “modern” blue tape, aka 2093 or really anything else does indeed suck. It’s like the difference between the variants of Super 77: 530e sure ain’t the stuff in the clean & neat spray can.

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That’s two people with opposite experience to me using blue tape as labeling. Interesting. I buy the 3M stuff with the slight orange peel texture to it. Maybe there is some other brand/type that works better? I’ve regretted every single time I used it for a label. The ink fades very fast and also rubs off easily.

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To throw in my anecdatum, I have labels made with felt marker on regular beige masking tape that are legible after at least ten years. I don’t know how relevant that may be to the blue tape experience.

Of course, one could use pencil, which sacrifices some readability but lasts indefinitely.

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Yah, I’ve never had trouble with the old fashioned beige masking tape as labels, though it’s pretty terrible for everything else (leaves so much sticky mess behind).

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