Maybe not. I just did a quick search through askjeeves.com and came up with the following from UL:
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Standing Columns Is there anything duct tape can't do?
Engineers at UL's Research Triangle Park, N.C., office developed the first Standard for adhesive tapes for use with flexible air ducts - adding yet another chapter to the wonderful history of the world's ultimate tool. Long the unsung hero of every handyman's toolbox, duct tape has gained quite a following over the past few years.
Boosters as varied as newspaper columnist Dave Barry, television's Tim "The Tool Man" Allen and Hollywood director Ron Howard have all paid homage to the humble adhesive.
Writers Tim Nyberg and Jim Berg, in fact, have built something of a cottage industry on praising its virtues. Their paperbacks, "The Duct Tape Book" and "Duct Tape - Real Stories," have sold a combined 400,000 copies to date, and holiday shoppers catapulted their "365 Days of Duct Tape Calendar" into best sellerdom during the Christmas season of 1996.
As befitting any pop icon worth its salt, duct tape even has its own site on the World Wide Web - several of them, as it turns out, many of which offer inspiring tales of how a roll of the sticky gray stuff saved some hapless citizen's day. There's the one about the good Samaritan in Nevada, for example, who towed another motorist's car out of a snow bank using a duct tape "chain."
And then there's the one about the astronauts who saved a moon rocket (and themselves) by using duct tape to rig an air filter - an all-too-true story retold in Ron Howard's blockbuster "Apollo 13."
Duct tape has been used for everything from water-proofing ammunition boxes to bolstering beauty contestants' bust lines, and it's still standard equipment on every NASA shuttle flight.
What it's supposed to do
Believe it or not, though, an awful lot of the $75-million-a-year product is actually used for sealing air ducts. And that is serious business, according to UL staff engineer Dwayne Sloan, who helped develop UL 181B, the first UL Standard covering pressure sensitive tape (including duct tape) intended for use with flexible heating, ventilation and air- conditioning ducts.
Every year, duct tape used to attach flexible heating, air-conditioning and ventilation pipe in air duct systems fails, costing industry and consumers millions of dollars in lost energy and repair costs.
For years, duct tape was considered just part of the air duct system, and thus fell under UL 181, a long-time industry Standard that covers factory- made air ducts and connectors.
In the early 1990s, however, Florida changed its building codes, stipulating that duct tape itself (or whatever "closure system" was used in a ventilation system) had to comply with UL 181. That change, Sloan explains, prompted UL to begin developing a separate Standard specifically designed for duct tape and similar adhesives.
"UL 181 evaluated specific duct designs with their joints but did not contain a true set of performance requirements for evaluating a closure system alone," Sloan says. "If we were to really evaluate a mastic or a duct tape on its own, we had to come up with a separate set of requirements. That's what started the effort."
In October 1995, after several years of closely working with government officials and manufacturers of ducts, tapes and mastics, UL published UL 181B, the Standard for Safety for Closure Systems for Use with Flexible Air Ducts and Air Connectors.
The Standard requires that duct tape pass a series of tests, including evaluations of tensile strength; peel adhesion strength; shear adhesion strength under a variety of weights, temperatures and humidity levels; long-term high-temperature effects; and surface burning characteristics. UL also evaluates the tape for its ability to inhibit fungi from growing. "You don't want mold growing on tape because it will eventually degrade the material," Sloan says.
Expect to see more UL Listed duct tape. Since its publication in 1995, UL 181B has been adopted by the Southern Building Code Congress International (SBCCI), and is referenced in Section 603 of the Standard Mechanical Code. In addition, the Standard specifies that, after January 1997, flexible air duct and connector manufacturers who have UL Listings must reference tape Listed to UL 181B in their products' installation instructions.
To date, four brands of duct tape have received the UL Mark with more brands now being evaluated. For easy identification, the UL Mark is printed every six inches on tape products that have obtained UL Listing to UL 181B.
Sloan is quick to point out that tape Listed to UL 181B has been evaluated only for sealing flexible ductwork. In other words, UL Listed tape has not been evaluated for, say, water-proofing diapers, repairing a four-wheel-drive vehicle's tie rods, or for any of the uses listed in the accompanying sidebar.
The product category that contains duct tape - Air Duct and Air Connector Closure Systems (ALKW) - can be found in UL's Gas and Oil Equipment Directory (gray book). For more information on UL Listed duct dape or other closure systems, call Dwayne Sloan in Research Triangle Park, N.C., at (919) 549-1676; fax him at (919) 547-6031; or send an e-mail message to sloand@ul.com.
THE TAPE OF 1,001 (AND PROBABLY MORE) USES
Tim Nyberg and Jim Berg, "The Duct Tape Guys," have collected a number of real-life uses for duct tape in their latest book "Duct Tape Book Two - Real Stories." Below are a number of the more "useful" ones.
Before hitting the slopes, a Minnesota man sticks random strips of duct tape on his new skis. That way, he figures, thieves will think the skis are damaged and won't steal them.
An employee of the Denver Museum of Natural History reports that duct tape is used to keep dinosaur bones in place while staff members prepare permanent supports that hold skeletons together for exhibition.
Another Minnesota man so loved duct tape in life that his family duct-taped his coffin shut.
[The preceding duct stories are from "Duct Tape Book Two - Real Stories" (Pfeifer-Hamilton, 1995, $6.95). To order, call toll free (800) 247-6789.]
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