OOAK Table Tennis Forum

I still think that if you wanted a small quantity of tape (maybe 10-100 strips of the same sort, say for your club or for a league team) an inkjet printer with a suitable printing medium would be the way to go, especially since you can use the printer for other purposes and you might already have one around anyway. I'm not sure what Gambler did, but the idea is to print the tape on sheets, and then strip it. Gambler probably worked with a local printer - the printer looked for the appropriate material, did the offset printing and did the stripping.

Iskandar

Yes you're right, but the trick is finding the right material to print on. I've never seen adhesive cloth sheets like the material used for most edge tapes.

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What might work, I think, is two layers - one would be thick, transparent vinyl double sided tape (you can find this in many hardware stores - it often has a red layer, which is removed to expose the second adhesive side), and the second layer would be the material I suggested earlier in the thread.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07T5J8JXC/re ... k_detail_5



In practice, you'd apply the double sided tape to the blade, remove the red liner, then apply the printed tape on top of it. Yeah, not something you'd want to offer for sale, but if you wanted, say, some personal edge tape for your own rackets, or for your league team, it would work pretty well. You might want to spray acrylic lacquer on top of the printing to make it waterproof (which is what we do when we print waterslide decals on inkjets). An alternative for the first layer would be white cloth binders' tape, if you can find it. And that AliExpress store that sells the material I mentioned earlier has a huge range of different materials, including cloth, some with adhesive on it. The problem is a lot of it requires buying rolls. Maybe they could send small samples. Actually, come to think of it.. the first layer needn't have two adhesive sides - but if it does, then the top layer doesn't necessarily have to be sticky at all!

Another option, perhaps - visit a company that prints inkjet banners and other advertising - maybe they have some suitable stick-on material that they can print on for you.

Iskandar

As long as you don't care about looks, cutting a strip of masking tape in half lengthwise and putting the layers over each other provides pretty good protection.

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Brothers labeling machines using polyester adhesive tapes/ You can also use DYMO Thermal adhesive tapes (in 10 colours) with Brothers labeling printers.
https://www.brother.co.nz/labelling

Kind of hard to print on masking tape, though...

Iskandar

I must admit, when I was about five years old, I thought those mechanical Dymo machines with the spin-around dial and squeeze trigger were the bees knees, the neatest thing ever. My parents owned one, it came out on rare occasions, the dial would be spun around, there'd be a click and the lettered plastic tape would appear out the end like magic, one letter at a time. Can't remember exactly where I saw it, there was this man who had set up shop in a five foot way, with about a dozen different machines and dozens of rolls of tape of various colors and widths making labels for people. That was cool. You can apparently still buy these machines and the tapes but they're fairly expensive in long lengths, are relatively stiff, and probably wouldn't make good edge tape. I suppose if all you want on your edge tape is a string of white upper case letters...



Iskandar

Its probably a gaffer tape. Like you said, Tesa makes them but I dont’t know which model is the best:
https://www.tesa.com/en-us/industry/tesa-4661.html
https://www.tesa.com/en-us/industry/tesa-4651.html
https://www.tesa.com/en-us/industry/tesa-4671.html
https://www.tesa.com/en-us/industry/tesa-4657.html

And Spike Tape does it too:
https://www.customtapes.com/Spike-Tape- ... tape-1.htm

If you just want plain (unprinted) edge tape yes, gaffer's tape or just plain old duct tape (they call it "cloth tape" here) works pretty well. I, in fact, use gaffer's tape when I want a black edge tape but most of the time I use a hot pink cloth tape which came, IIRC, from Daiso. The tape comes in two inch (i.e. 50mm) widths, but with cloth tapes it's easy to tear off a strip of whatever width you want. Once you get the strip started you can just keep pulling and it'll tear off in the required width.

If you need more padding... I've suggested using molded rubber weather stripping tape before.

Iskandar