Vehicle Roof Skinning

Reasons to include the use of tesa ACX® plus adhesive tapes within your vehicle roof skinning builds-

• Provides a very high bond and core strength unlike conventional foam tapes.
• Instant bonding allows much faster process times compared to liquid adhesive – saving £’s on labour costs.
• Greatly improves watertightness by eliminating or reducing the amount of mechanical fastenings and other materials required.
• Very good ageing and temperature resistance with great cold shock resistance.
• Currently being used by a number of your competitors within the commercial body building market!

Austen Instant Tapes Ltd bring you the very latest solutions for vehicle roof skinning, providing proven benefits, including improving production speed and savings on labour costs.

We have spent years working with our industrial partners to research and provide you with state of the art solutions for your vehicle roof skinning applications.

tesa ACX® plus adhesive tapes provide a strong, secure, faster and more watertight attachment of roof skin materials to frame with zero or minimal mechanical fastenings required.

For more information on this or to discuss any application you may have, please contact us.

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Vehicle Roof Skinning With tesa ACX® plus Technical Data

Case Study – Vehicle Roofing

Customers Previous Method And Application

This company manufactured a range of rigid-bodied trailers, anything up to 13.5m long, fastening glass reinforced plastic panels as roofing, secured to the vehicle aluminium frame with adhesives and rivets.

The fastening of roof panel bonding is critical to the performance of the trailer, ensuring the  overall structural integrity of the trailer while also protecting the load from the elements including water and dust, while also experiencing other critical factors.

The customer’s existing process consists of the use of  liquid adhesive, adhesive tape and rivets. After mounting the panels using the liquid and adhesive tape, rivets were installed every 25mm along the length of the joint. A sealant was then applied to prevent leakage at the rivet holes.

This process was extremely time-consuming, with a single roof taking six hours to complete. Moreover, panels fitted to trailers used in demanding environment sometimes experience cracking, as the large number of mechanical fasteners prevent relative movement between the panel and frame caused by their different rates of thermal expansion.

Assessment And Solution

After evaluating the customer’s application and current processes, it was identified to simplify the installation process, hence reducing assembly time and significantly reducing the number of mechanical fasteners required.  The durability of the proposed solution was initially evaluated at tesa’s Application Solution Center (ASC), where accelerated environmental testing showed that the recommended tape would have a service life of 25 years, more than twice the expected operating life of a trailer.

It was concluded that by replacing the combination of liquid adhesive and foam tape with tesa® ACXplus tape, it would remove significant time and
labour costs from the assembly process. Manufacturing teams have no longer have to wait for adhesives to cure or spend time cleaning residual adhesive from the bonded areas.

More significantly, the high strength of the tesa tape on this application has allowed it to increase the spacing between rivets to more than a metre, dramatically reducing drilling, riveting and sealing. This is expected to have a positive effect on the incidence of cracking induced by thermal movement, which can now be accommodated by the tape’s core properties.

(Case study details kindly provided by tesa®, all rights reserved tesa® 2022 )