This is Bed-It Tape. Bed-It Tape was developed after this article was originally written & published.
It all began when I started to get nasty emails saying the butyl tape folks purchased did not behave or perform as I had described in the article. Some boat owners had even purchased "butyl tape" that was water soluble. I went ahead and began ordering various butyl tapes, despite some only being sold is case lot quantities, and testing it.
I quickly discovered the butyl tapes of today, thanks to changes in EPA standards, were not what they had been in the 70's & early 80's. The products I tested were so horrible I was driven into developing a true marine quality product specifically for this purpose. Bed-It Tape is not a simple run of the mill butyl tape it's a hybrid elastomeric butyl based tape with properties specifically formulated for bedding deck hardware. Bed-It Tape is a Compass Marine Inc. product. This formulation is not licensed to any other companies.
Bed-It Tape is 1/16" thick by 1/2" wide X 50' long. It is specifically engineered & formulated for bedding marine deck hardware and best of all it is manufactured right here in the US supporting US jobs! Even the corrugated packaging is made here in the USA.
Many builders used to use butyl tapes, CS Yachts and many others did, but they all stopped because using butyl in a production environment is significantly more labor intensive, read slower, despite being a better mouse trap.
The benefits of Bed-It Tape are numerous:
#1 It never hardens and remains at the same thick consistency for well over 30 years.
#2 Because it never hardens it always remains flexible.
#3 It is multiples more flexible than a cured polyurethane.
#4 It sticks extremely well to clean gelcoat, fiberglass, plastics, aluminum, bronze, stainless, acrylic, polycarbonates etc. and has been specifically tested on these substrates.
#5 It's NOT a glue, and for through bolted deck hardware you do not need a glue.
#6 You can easily remove hardware sealed with Bed-It Tape in the future, without destroying your decks.
#7 Bed-It Tape is specifically formulated to resist cold flow or creep once properly tightened.
