Picture this: your client is coming in for an installation appointment. Their chair is ready, your station is clean, and you have your tools and Walker Tape® prep products ready to go. All you need is your tape or liquid adhesive.
You go to grab them, and gasp! All your tapes have melted, and your liquid adhesives have gotten hard. They’re unusable. Why? They weren’t stored properly.
With this guide to storing Walker Tape® products, you can prevent problems like these from happening. Our tips will help keep your adhesives fresh and usable.
Storing Walker Tape® Products
Keep Tapes Away from Extreme Weather
Sudden variations in temperature (hot or cold) can negatively affect a tapes performance, making it unusable on your clients.
The adhesives on tape exist between a state of liquid and solid. When you expose tapes to high temperatures, they melt into a more liquid form. In cold temperatures, they can become hard and brittle, causing them to shatter and break.
The best temperature to store your tapes is between 60° – 80° Fahrenheit, or 15° – 27° Celsius. For our Kelvin fans out there, that would be between 288K – 300K. Be careful to never exceed 90° F/ 32° C/ 305K when storing your tapes.
Keep all Flammable Liquids (and Yourself!) Away from Ignition Sources
Most of Walker Tape®’s liquid products (removers, liquid adhesives, etc.) are flammable. This means that you need to keep them far away from anything that can ignite them.
Always check your surroundings for anything that could potentially cause a fire in your salon.
- This includes candles or other open flames, electrical outlets, hot surfaces, motors, etc.
Make sure to store your liquid adhesives between 60° – 80° Fahrenheit, or 15° – 27° Celsius.
Also – make sure to keep liquid products locked and out of reach of children. They are not safe for consumption, or to be played with.
Keep Tapes & Liquid Adhesives Away from Sun Exposure and Humidity
Exposure to sunlight, ultraviolet (UV) rays, and humidity can break down tapes and liquid adhesives until they are no longer good to use. This can happen before they’ve even been applied.
The lifespans of liquid adhesives can be shortened when exposed to heat and sunlight, rendering them unusable on clients.
Our German Brown tape is at a higher risk of this, due to its rubber base being more sensitive to the effects of light, UV, and humidity.
These conditions do affect the rest of our tapes and liquid adhesives, though to a lesser extent than German Brown. We make them with acrylic bases, which is better suited for exposure to sunlight, UV rays, and humidity.
Keep your tapes and liquid adhesives stored in a designated, dark, dry, and well ventilated area to prevent breakdowns like this.
The exception to this are our hard bond adhesives. Hard bonds only continue to grow stronger throughout time. Store your hard bond adhesives in a freezer to slow the hardening process.
Keep Tapes & Liquid Adhesives Away from Oxygen
Tapes & liquid adhesives will degrade over time with exposure to oxygen (like an apple that has been bit, or an open cereal box). But, this process can be accelerated by improper storage.
To prevent oxidation, make sure to store the tapes in their original packaging, or your own sealable containers. This will help protect the tapes from the air, and help them last longer.
With liquid adhesives, exposure to oxygen can cause them to harden faster. Here are some storage tips to prevent that from happening:
- Make sure to keep all lids and caps tightly closed once you are finished using them. Double or triple check if you have to!
- Use smaller bottles of liquid adhesives. Larger bottles can and will dry out quicker if not used fast enough.
- Only open one bottle of a product at a time, keeping the other ones sealed until the first one is empty.
We recommend starting with smaller bottles of liquid adhesives, until you get a feel for your salon’s usage habits.
By following the guidelines above, our liquid adhesives have a maximum shelf life of six months, and our tapes have a max shelf life of one year.
Ready to put these storage guidelines into practice? Well, take advantage of the best prices on all Walker Tape products by ordering from us at WalkerTapeCo.com.
