Speaker 1: So many things in your car, like those dash cams I've cajoled you to get are held on with permanent tape. You know, the stuff, this red back 3m, gray foam tape, wickedly sticky, and it won't let go. Here's how to make permanent tape less. So
Speaker 1: Now the trick to getting things held on with this permanent mounting tape to let go is not to use brute force, but to know [00:00:30] the tricks that 3m tells you, if you're just willing to listen, let's go here to our sample windshield and walk through the process. So I've got a dash cam here. Let's say, I've got this attached, you know, the drill, you get a nice clean piece of windshield and you get that on there and you press it and you hold it for a little while and then you let it set. And within about an hour that thing's held on for life, right? Then you want to go and get rid of it. You say, okay, I want to change my dash cam and you can get the camera [00:01:00] off maybe, but wow, this thing is tough and you start wrenching at it and pulling at it and nothing will get it to let go.
Speaker 1: You're gonna break something before that tape lets go. And here's why this stuff is designed to be exceptionally tough against what they call high dynamic loads, yanking, pulling, tapping at it, things like that. What it's not so, so good at is slow gradual pressure. But first 3m says, you've gotta break the bond. You've gotta get it started [00:01:30] somewhere. Now a lot of folks will reach for a single blade razor. One of the great useful tools in the automotive tool chest. And yes, you can probably get down and underneath there with this and just get it started on the edge. It's a little dicey. You're dealing with a razor blade slip with this and you'll regret it. You could scratch up your glass. You could end up finding that it's just very difficult to get in there with this thing, right? Or with a paint scraper that uses one of these.
Speaker 1: So here's another little trick they [00:02:00] tell us about use some dental floss. It doesn't out to be cool men, but it does smell good. Take out some Flos you know about the amount you'd use to wash your teeth and then get behind whatever is held on with the tape. And I'm gonna be careful here cuz this windshield's not really on a car. It's sitting on a stand, but basically you get inside there. Oh, look at that. And you can art boy, I can almost take this off with the flaws, but now I've broken the seal over there [00:02:30] on the edge. You see, now you can start to take whatever you've got and I'm gonna remove my camera at this point, which is a magnetic Mount in this case. And this is where you would start it to very gradually pull and look, I'm going slowly.
Speaker 1: And if you go slowly, it'll let go. Either from the windshield or from the product it's attached to. When I yanked on [00:03:00] it hard, I wouldn't let go. Now this didn't fully cure as you saw. So this would be a little tougher in real life because this hasn't been on here long, but I'm demonstrating for you. The idea that a slow gradual pole is what defeats this stuff, not the brute force you were trying to use. You'll frequently get. So I'm still stuck on your product or on the windshield. So now to finish this off, you might think I'm gonna grab the goon or some other citrus based stuff and just start rubbing and cleaning. You can do that. But the other [00:03:30] idea is to roll and to vary gradually again, slowly or it'll tear or start to leave residue in its trail. And if you just do this, like, so there you go. I've got almost no residue on. There came off cleanly and I wasn't fighting with it.
Speaker 1: Now I'm only got a little bit of adhesive residue that didn't come off there. I'm going after that with citrus oil. But there's another technique that some use where you work down on [00:04:00] some masking tape, which obviously is designed to let go. And you really burnish that onto the residue. Like so, and then supposedly you can very slowly peel that back again. The slow theme and the residue comes with it. It never works for me and it didn't work this time, either that all knock out with some citrus oil, but this was a whole lot easier than fighting with tools and brute force and sweating and swearing to get supposedly permanent tape to let go. Now let's [00:04:30] see, you've got a piece of tape stuck somewhere where it's a different situation. You've got a peel, a strip of it off. Unlike what I just did, where it came off largely with the product in that case, same thing.
Speaker 1: Break the seal. I'll take my floss down here, get it started. And then the key is to bring this off at a very low angle. Your inclination is to yank it off at kind of a right angle, right? But what you want to do is almost like with command adhesive, if you've used that, pull it and take it off very [00:05:00] low angle. I guess you'd call that very obliquely like this. So I'm stretching and pulling and I'm doing so in a way, that's not gonna threaten as much to remove the finish in this case, or if it's stuck to your dashboard to remove the top layer of it, which is disastrous. Remember when they used to sell GPS units and they had these bases, you were supposed to stick with this stuff right on the surface of your dash. That's like now practice today. No one does that anymore, [00:05:30] but here's a way to get that kind of tape off without lifting off the surface of your dash low angle pull. It's one of the tricks you need to know in this era, when lots of things are attached just in your car with this kind of tape.
