We recently discover with an early lot of TNR Tape, that over time the adhesive begins to stick to the secondary release liner. During separating of the two liners, this causes the adhesive to stick to both sides resulting in a gooey mess.
Our initial investigation seemed to indicate that the on the earlier lot it only effected 10-20% of the samples, and it took about 2-3 months for it to become evident. We deduced from this instance that the root cause was a faulty release liner, that had a large variation in surface energy. Later lots used the same liner, and we didn't see the issue so we decided to produce one new lot to confirm our hypothesis. This latest manufacturing lot showed no issues and looked great. However, we knew that customers might have this material over the length of season, so in 3-4 months will this start to exhibit the same issue?
We decided to do some thermal aging tests to simulate a 3-6 month shelf life. For the latest lot that we just received, we found about 5-10% of the lot exhibits the issue after the thermal aging. Although we could sell this lot, and probably only a small fraction of the customers would be impacted, it goes against our ethos. In the cycling industry, quality is paramount, and more so for a small business. We will never sell something we are not 100% confident in. Having now knows there is a latent defect issue in this lot, we would never sell that to our customers.
Unfortunately this means that our current inventory has to be scrapped, and this means that more TNR Tape won't hit our shelves here for another week. We are trying to do everything we can to pull in this latest batch, which will feature a new release liner, but it requires new tooling and that takes time. We will keep updating the product pages with the expected delivery(following some thermal aging tests to validate it). If you would like an email update when its available, just shoot us a message at info@tnr-tape.com and we will be sure to keep you in the loop.
Thanks,
Aaron Collins
TNR-Tape.com