For the past few years, a group at the University of Massachussetts Amherst have been reverse engineering the gecko to make an adhesive called Geckskin. An index-card sized piece of Geckskin supports up to 700 pounds on smooth surfaces (like glass) and can be easily removed, leaving no residue.
Easy DIY Gecko Tape
The project is led by Al Crosby, a materials scientist and engineer, and Duncan Irschick, an integrative biologist and innovator whose gecko research helped reveal the amazing adhesive forces at play in gecko toe-pads. PhD candidates Mike Bartlett and Daniel King helped develop Geckskin and coauthored a 2012 paper on the material.
Because there are some tiny cuts to make and scoring to do, we recommend using a cutting machine for this project. However, you can also cut and score your paper geckos by hand using our printable template.
While you can use our photos as inspiration, we encourage you to get creative with your paper geckos. Our designer Krista used Posca paint pens to draw on vibrant spots and other markings. But you could also use crayons, colored pencils, gel pens, or anything pigmented.
Download our SVG cut file or PDF template below, then cut and score your paper geckos. Use a paint pen to add some color variation and more detail to your geckos. Then, fold your geckos according to the score lines.
Shock absorption and cushioning are often the main priority when considering what bar tape to buy because these will have the biggest impact on keeping your hands comfortable. Material choice can also affect grip when riding in the wet, and durability too.
Beyond comfort and control, swapping out old bar tape for new is an affordable way to customise a bike or give it a new lease of life. In fact, as far as cheap road bike upgrades go, a roll of new tape is one of the easiest ways to freshen up your ride.
Often, synthetic materials are used as an outer and paired with a gel or foam inner. This can drastically alter the feel of a bike with non-backed tapes being as thin as 1.5mm and backed tapes being as thick as 5mm.
Thickness and backing of bar tape often come down to personal preference. Maybe you are riding on gravel and want as much vibration to be absorbed as possible, or you ride with cycling gloves so prefer a thinner bar tape.
His new trap is just an upturned dog bowl from IKEA covered in surgical tape that has been dyed black. Bedbugs are attracted to black and have a natural tendency to scale vertical surfaces. Those that climb into the bowl have a hard time getting out.
Photo: Without adhesives, all kinds of everyday jobs would bemuch more difficult. Adhesive bandages ("sticking plasters") work a bit like sticky tape: they use a pressure-sensitive adhesive on a plastic or textile backing. Historically, bandages like this used "natural" adhesives made from rubber and rosin. Today, they're more likely to use synthetic adhesives such as acrylic resins. These adhesives have to be sticky (but not so much that they rip your skin), water resistant, and hypoallergenic (not causing an allergic reaction).
Artwork: Flypaper is a simple way of trapping pesky insects on adhesive-coated paper. Back in the 19th century, you could buy commercial fly paper like this "Sure Catch" (made by J. Hungerford Smith Co. of Rochester, NY, USA), but it was easy to make your own using sticky natural adhesives like molasses or bird lime (itself made from tree fruits or bark). Photo courtesy of US Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Photo: Post-it notes attach themselves with help from lots of "microcapsules" (tiny microscopic bubblesof adhesive) on the reverse, which are much larger than the glue particles on conventional sticky tape.
Geckos have been baffling people for over 2000 years, ever since one of the very first scientists, Aristotle, wondered why they can walk upside down on the ceiling. Now a gecko has mass, so it also has weight. Gravity pulls it downwards like anything else. If you tried walking on the ceiling, you'd very quickly find yourself on the floor. So how do geckos defy one of the most basic laws of physics?
If a force acts on an object, but that object doesn't move, there must be another force acting in the opposite direction. In other words, two forces must be exactly balancing one another. Since the gecko doesn't fall, there must be another force acting upwards that stops gravity from pulling it down.
Maybe the gecko has suction pads on its feet?Scientists thought this might be the explanation. So they put a gecko in a tank and sucked all the air out of it. Strangely enough, the gecko still managed to walk on the ceiling.
Perhaps the gecko's body squeezes out some kind of glue?That was another theory the scientists tested. But when they examined a tank that geckos had been climbing around in, they found no evidence of any sticky stuff.
Could static electricity explain it?Electricity can certainly stick things together. If you rub a balloon on a woolen jumper, the balloon will eventually stick to you. Rubbing makes static electricity build up on the balloon's surface. This creates an electrical force between the rubber and your jumper that makes the balloon stick. Forces like this are called electrostatic because they use static (non-moving) electricity.
Does static electricity make the gecko stick?Moisture tends to make static electricity disappear: static electricity will flow away through the water and vanish. But if you put a gecko in a really humid tank, or one with a moist ceiling, it can still do the upside-down trick. So static electricity doesn't quite explain what's happening either.
So what is the trick? Each one of the geckos feet is covered in millions of tiny hairs called setae. Looking under a powerful electron microscope, scientists found each hair is also a bit like a brush with hundreds of bristles (called spatulae) at its end. When the gecko walks on the ceiling of a tank, hundreds of millions of bristles are brushing against the glass. Each gecko bristle is made of organic (carbon-based) molecules, while the glass is made up of molecules of a different substance, silicon dioxide. When the gecko moves its hairs over the glass, the organic molecules brush past the silicon-dioxide molecules. When the two types of molecules are extremely close together, tiny electrostatic forces (van der Waals forces) magically appear between them. Each of the organic molecules sticks to a silicon dioxide molecule like a balloon sticks to your jumper. Every single bristle provides a microscopic upward force that helps to stick the gecko to the ceiling. With hundreds of billions of bristles all working as a team, there's more than enough sticking force to balance the gecko's weight.
I recently found some research about Gecko tape from The Thought Emporium. With only the tip of their fingers, geckos can walk on walls and ceillings, and almost any kind of surface. Their fingers are covered by microscopic hairs called setae, and they are the secret of the very strong grip of their paws. By replicating these tiny hair, scientists developped a super strong kind of tape. In the video from Thought Emporium, they found a way to make a working prototype of gecko tape by casting sylicone on light defracting film. Light defracting film, on a microscopic level, is similar to gecko tape. I wanted to try my own prototype, and maybe acheve something that would climb walls!
For my first prototype, I wanted to try something that would do 2 movements in one blow, so strech up, then bend to stick on the wall. I drew my prototype on adobe illustrator. To lazercut it, I had to export my drawing in .svg, open it in inkscape then change the colors to avoid any problems. I used scraps of acrylic sheets we had, and the presets of the laser cutter for it. when all my pieces were cut, I sticked the acrylic pieces together with the glue I had at home. For the sticky tip of my toe, I made a mold with a light defracting file holder I had. As the Thought Emporium pointed out, the microscopic pattern needed to defract the light is similar to the one we need to make gekko tape. Altho, My file holder might not be the ideal material and precise thing to use...
I used Ecoflex 00-20 silicone to cast my gecko toe. I first filled the two parts of my mold, then bonded the two of them together with a bit more silicone. I lost some presision there; I put too much silicone, and when I put the first part on top of the other, the extra silicone moved and filled the parts I wanted to stay empty. I sealed my component to a rigid tube with a tie wrap, plugged it to an air pump.
My silicone gecko tape was not as sucessful as the prototype on youtube. It might be because first my defracting film could have ben coated with something, I have no way to be sure that is was ideal for this experiment on a microscopic level. Second, it might be because my silicone wasn't as stiff as theirs.
I made different versions of the contracting muscle. First, the one with a hard cardboard skelleton inside. I prepared different sizes of the same model, to see how the scale affects the contraction. The cardboard structure was made by hand, and I sealed it inside a soft plastic bag. The thermal heater at the lab was pretty easy to use, and I sealed the bag a little too small so the cardboard would stay a bit folded. To seal the bag to a tube, I used some scraps of silicone from my prototype of earlier, wrapped a sample of it around the tube, added the plastic bag and tightened everything together with tie wraps. My homemade silicone seal was pretty effective! The results were remarkably strong! The scale didin't affect the strength of the muscle, and I regret not trying even smaller. The fancy shape is an origami design I wanted to try. It was based ou of a square, and when completely folded, made a smaller square. the hardest part was to make the seal just a bit too small, so the origami would fold, and not just flatten when we suck the air out. My prototype worked, but after seeing it in action... I still can't find any use to it! But it's nice to see that most origami design could work. 2ff7e9595c
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