Video Transcript for A Closer Look at the Alpha Systems Mylar-Backed Butyl Tape for RV Walls

Hi there RV and trailer owners. Today, we're going to be taking a look at Alpha Systems butyl tape. This butyl tape does come in various lengths and sizes. We have lengths from 20 to 45 feet. The width of the strips can come between 3/8" up to one and a half inches. And the thickness of the strips can be anywhere from 1/16" of an inch, up to 3/16" of an inch.

These are also available in two different qualities. You can get the Q130 and the Q180. The Q130 is the slightly heavier duty butyl tape. And it's a considered to be non trimable by Alpha Systems. And it's going to be more for your, your rail pieces and kind of the things that you don't want to see cause it's a little bit heavier duty and it's considered non-trimable.

It's what we use today for our antenna up here. Cause we wanted to ensure we got a good seal here on the roof and we knew we we're going to be covering it with self-leveling sealant, so having the nicer trimable, better looking trimable butyl tape of the Q180, really isn't necessarily up here. The Q180 though is really ideal for your windows and your doorframes, areas where you want to keep it nice and clean and be able to trim that butyl tape very smoothly and easily with a plastic knife so you don't end up messing up any kind of paint surfaces and things like that. Then the Q80 is going to be the more appropriate option. But otherwise their properties are going to be very similar and you can, you can get those in various lengths, depending on the applications of what you're working on, the width of the surfaces you need to seal, maybe for your windows and door frames, maybe you're a little thicker than what you would need for something like your roof antenna or a like a solar panel or something like that.

This butyl tape that we're going to be using is 3/4" wide by an 1/8" thick. That's going to give us a nice protective layer that we can put along the whole bottom to seal it to the roof. And so very kind of putty tacky sealant, that's going to stay like this and squish around and really fill in the gaps. And I highly recommended it in areas when you're screwing things to the roof, because it can actually, when you go to screw the screw in, you thread it through the butyl tape here, it actually wick down the screw to help it seal even the threads down inside your roof to prevent any moisture from wicking down your fasteners and causing damage and deterioration to your roof here, cause it is made of wood so water will rot and deteriorate that over time. So we want to keep all that moisture out of there and buytl tapes one of the best ways to do so.

And we're going to be showing you, here are a couple of different ways that butyl tape is going to save this roof from future issues. We're replacing the TV antenna on us. We've got our new antenna here. And one of the things you're going to notice is that our old antenna was quite a bit different shape than our new antenna. When we go to put this in place in roughly that location, we've got all these screw holes that are exposed around the outer perimeter of our new antenna base. We can't have screw holes in the roof. That's not going to work. That's going to cause issues with moisture contamination and causing rot and things like that. Now self-leveling sealant is a great sealant that we're going to be using with this as well to help seal this up. But the self-leveling sealant is just kind of your top protective layer and we want to get down inside of the, all these holes and that's where the butyl tape here is going to come in handy. So, first thing we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and get this antenna mounted up because we are unsure exactly, you know, which all holes are not going to be covered until we get it mounted on there. And then we can address those holes. Before we put self-leveling sealant in place. We're going to be putting this all the way around the whole bottom. That way it's going to seal it to the roof, when we screw it down, it's going to squish this butyl tape, get in between all these grooves from the texture on our roof, as well as inside the areas here to seal this up. We want to make sure that when we're putting the butyl tape on, we're covering the entire perimeter and you can see our screw holes here, do kind of go slightly towards the inside. We want to make sure that the butyl tape is covering up those screw holes. So that way, when we screw it down, it does wick down into the roof. So we're just going to be putting this on now, just ripping out some pieces and putting it in place. And we're just going to repeat this all the way around our antenna. And if you've got some spots where you need to add a little bit more it's okay, like this a little bit here, it's getting a little bit thin on the end. And we had kind of a spot that we missed back here so we can take it and fill that in. Because the most important thing is that we've got complete coverage. Now, since our antenna, since the coaxial cable here for our TV is routed on top of the roof and we're going to have to like route it all the way underneath. And we grounded out that little slot there, we want to make sure that the seals, so we're going to be taking butyl tape and we're going to be wrapping it around our antenna wire here. So we know that when it goes through, passes underneath, it's going to be sealed. I'm probably going to take another piece and put it on the opposite side and make sure it's got complete coverage. All right. So now that we've got that prepared. We can start to put this in place, make sure that this cable stays lined up for us because of our special circumstances. We can go ahead and get our fastener screwed down. So, we mentioned before now, before we put our self-leveling sealant on it, we need to cover up any screw holes that are left behind from the difference in the shape between our two antennas. So you can see here, we've got a couple right here, so we're just taking some small chunks of buytl tape. We're going to put it over top of the hole. We're gonna take one of the factory screws that we had removed from our previous antenna and just to poke it down into that hole through the butyl tape. We'll do the same with this one, I'm just gonna lift up on the butyl tape so I can see where that hole is so I can match my screw up with it. And now we're just gonna run this into place. Same thing with our other one here, just run this one in place. And we're going to repeat that for any remaining screw holes that we have here in the roof, so that way, when we go to put the self-leveling sealant on top, we know we wicked down inside the hole with our butyl tape. And that completes our look at Alpha Systems butyl tape..