The big weekend in the UK maker calendar is nearly here! This is the second year for the UK Maker Faire which is a baby of the big beast in California every year, and it’s on this weekend March 13-14 at the Centre for Life in the middle of Newcastle.
We’ll be there !
Got a project that could use some sugru? Something broken waiting for a fix? Or a badly needed hack?
There’ll be a limited amount of free sugru available for hacking over the weekend, so email us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), tell us what you’d like to hack / repair / make and we’ll book you in!

Florian sent back this picture and I loved the texture, so I asked what he used. He said:
“simple! make a little sugru ball. lay it where the foot belongs.take a screw. breathe on it. press down. done!”
I got inspired and used the same technique on my squash racket.
Anyone else found a good tool to create texture with?

Skilled and crafted uses of sugru impress us for sure, but isn’t there something great about this ad-hoc style hack?

Musicians have started using sugru!
We were really interested to read this review of sugru on this woodwind website, where it’s been used to make the custom key risers. “Palm key risers are used to increase the height of the palm keys – typically the top D, Eb and F keys, but can also be found on the side trill keys too. Many players find these keys have their touchpieces set too low for speed and comfort, and the addition of a riser can help matters considerably.” Cool !
Derek sent in the pic below, where he used sugru to replace a missing control knob on his bass guitar.
Where will sugru crop up next?

I have to admit to a certain thrill when someone successfully repairs or hacks something EXPENSIVE with sugru, so when Joe from Guatemala sent back this repair he did on his microscope I grinned :D

“I used sugru to lock in the adjustable eye piece. The threads normally tighten the eye piece to the body but they were stripped and someone had tried to repair it with superglue. The superglue didn’t hold the piece, so I removed the adjustable eye piece, pulled the lens assembly away from the body and pressed sugru into the cavity and used a small flat wooden stick to do the pressing and smoothing. The result is shown in the picture. I did not trim it. I was quite surprised and pleased to have repaired this equipment and save the cost of major repairs.”

If, like me, you have lots of jumpers that you love but they don’t look their best anymore because the moths have gotten too cosy with them, you’ll LOVE this!
Woolfiller is a new product by dutch designer Heleen Klopper. I repaired one of my favourite jumpers and scarf at the weekend and I still have a pile to tackle. The video on the website shows how it’s done – and it really is that easy – and very satisfying ! I love that you can choose nice colours and enjoy the repairs – it’s pretty much like sugru for your clothes !!

Holy Moly! those are some impressive skills !! What do people think ?!

This week the Designs of the Year exhibition opened in the London Design Museum, and sugru was nominated in the product category! We decided to make an installation of hacks copied from / inspired by pictures you’ve tweeted or sent back to us – there’s about 100 hacks in there and it feels like rooting at a junk sale of very curious stuff ! The exhibition features lots of interesting projects including this electric airplane and the story of stuff, and it’s open until June so if you’re in London – pop by!

This beautiful ice cream van makes clouds of ice cream. Well, in theory anyway :) Cat and Zoe made the van as part of their Cloud Project – they wanted to make a place to “amaze and inspire people to think critically about their relationship to emerging technologies and weather modification”.
I visited the van and had a really interesting chat with them about cloud seeding and other geo-engineering ideas and they definitely have got me fascinated by this subject.
Thanks to an incredible talk by Stewart Brand I went to two or three weeks ago, I’m starting to read more about it now.
I guess that means the van did a good job!

I just read the story behind this t-shirt on Matt Jones’ blog – inspiring!

If you got our newsletter last month, then you already know about HACKquariums.
Since we put out the call we’ve had lots of really brilliant applications sent back! Helloatto hosted a prototype HACKquarium last night in Belfast, and robots.ie are hosting another as part of the MAKE night at the Science Gallery in Dublin tomorrow night.
We’re just starting to get back to the people who have applied now, and wowee, you guys are cool !!!

So what’s the story?

Well, while we’re scaling up, we want as many of you as possible to play with and enjoy sugru, so we had an idea. Why don’t you lot host HACKquariums (HACKquaria?) … all over the world?
“What’s a HACKquarium then?” you might ask. It’s a good question – we just made it up.
A HACKquarium is a locally hosted night where you get to meet fellow hackers, have a few drinks and stick sugru on your stuff.
You provide the venue and the hackers, and we’ll provide massive blocks of sugru (for free!), as well as some instructional videos and a guide to making your HACKquarium kick ass.
We’re also looking for someone to provide the beer, but still no promises.
Apply to host a HACKquarium in your city, town or garden shed.

David sent us in images of some beautiful models he made with sugru for his project Acoustic Botany. My favourite is this sonic termite mound idea.

Jim from Maryland sent in this cracker !
“After years of dedicated service, my dzezva, (small pot for Turkish coffee) split badly at the handle. Multiple repair attempts with gobs of glue did not help. I sawed off the split third of the handle, sanded it down and drilled in a new screw hole. It needed reinforcement at the joint and some insulation against further splitting, so green Sugru covered most of the handle. More reinforcement was needed and the green stem suggested a flower.”
Hope it lasts long time Jim :)

What do you think sugru phone hackers? is this the best we’ve seen so far?

Didn’t get your order in quick enough? If your need is bad and you just can’t wait, then this is for you!
Send us a picture of what you need it for, or a story about why you need it – and if it’s interesting, unusual, nice or just downright desperate enough we just might send you a little pack to do the job.
Only condition is that you post / tweet / send us pictures !
So if you’re itching for it, tell us why at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) !

Thanks for sending this in Jonas – looks brill !

Thanks for sticking with us! It’s going to be a little longer before you can buy sugru again, but I’m working day and night to make it happen.

James and I made a video to explain the scale-up.

Geoffrey from New York sent in this wicked hack!
“I love my roomba, but it is 1/16” too short for my entertainment stand. 9/10 times, I come home to a stuck roomba.
I added just enough height to the top of the bumper to keep it from getting stuck, but left enough gaps in the sugru to keep the sensor from being blocked. Problem Solved. THANKS!!! “
I think that’s the first robot hacked with sugru :D

Thanks Brendan for the recipe!

Ingredients
Half a cup of porridge oats
1 cup of milk
1 vice grips

Mix milk with the porridge oats and place in microwave. Take vice grips from tool box and set timer on microwave.

That’s pretty much how I cook porridge, baked beans, heat milk etc… Bit of a lottery when it comes to timing and pretty much one in every three dishes that go into the microwave end up in the bin as a burnt wreck…….

That was until I used sugru – Now I have a better timer than I had to begin with… I’ve been using it every day for the past month and it’s still absolutely perfect – Dead on accurate every time and a bright orange accessory to my dull old microwave !!!

This sweet hack came from Barbara in the Netherlands: “It’s a hook on a door that kept on moving back and forth in the wind, making annoying sounds!” love it Barbara!

Every month (starting now!) we award 5 packs of sugru to the most inspiring hack or repair. The first award goes to Cary for hacks with a level of detail and decoration we haven’t seen before !
We loved @piscues juggling clubs for his free style hacking, Jeremy’s iphone stand (we’re also excited that he made a site for his sugru hacks!), Radiorental’s mintyboost phone charger and Peter’s repaired canyon boots for his ‘test it out’ approach… but in the end we got giddy about Cary’s crazy twisted hacks that feel like they could be props from a David Cronenberg movie!

Peter sent in these photos of his first sugru repair. His ‘testing’ approach is just what sugru needs, afterall when it comes to it, every hack / repair is unique!
Peter wrote: “One 5g sachet was enough to repair my canyon boots with some left over for a doorstop too. I was repairing the perished rubber uppers of my canyon boots with polyester thread and neoprene glue, but I needed something to rebuild the broken buckle strap retainers. I sewed them with a few strands of thread to hold them in place and to give some composite strength, then squidged some Sugru on … better than new. The waterproof nature of Sugru will hopefully hold firm, I’ll test it out on the river and report my findings. I am interested to find out if Sugru sticks to polyethylene plastic and whether it can cure underwater or adhere to damp surfaces (by squeezing away the water droplets). That’ll be my next test.”

Lovely iphone stand hack! And very nice site as well !

Yesterday we spent the day doing mixing trials in the big mixer we’re going to buy. Apart from getting snowed in at the factory (eek), the day went really well and we’re doing more trials in the first week of January. So exciting seeing such a huge blob of sugru come out!

radiorental sent in pics of this lovely usb charger, he thinks it has a shot at hack of the month – and maybe it does! What do you think?
You can see some more images on flikr here. He credits @ladyada with the original project idea; but we think the sugru is great on there ! can imagine it will protect the usb port when it’s getting knocked around in your bag etc. Gonna order one of those kits now and make our own !

We found this on gruntzooki’s flikr photostream: ‘My first sugru hack, fossil bison bone support.’ Deadly.

Loving these hacked juggling clubs for softer juggling by @piscue !

I love the simplicity of this idea! Changing a ‘raw’ screw into a soft colourful shape is just so satisfyingly simple and nice ! The top pic was taken before the second screw was covered to show the contrast. The bottom pic is of a tool that Tom made to open the high windows in our office – it’s just a long screw in a brush handle covered over with some left over green sugru from one of our lab tests!

Made this the other night! loving it ! The sugru curls around the bottom of the mug a little bit so when you put it on the table it has little pads… sounds funny but I love changing the sound of things! I did our office plates a while back and when you stack them they make no sound. nice.
Getting more ideas now!

For those who don’t know her, Marloes ten Bhomer makes the most amazing and crazy handmade shoes we have ever seen. Check out her website here. We’re totally chuffed that she uses sugru in her workshop! Here are two examples; where she hacked a clamp to work better for holding the leather on the last, and where she hacked a skive knife to make it more comfortable to use for paring the leather.

The first hacks from the first batch of sales have come in! These are from Rob who said: “…the scalpel and the pen were really just playing around. Adding gripping surfaces to every day items. The Sugru’d up pedals were actually done to solve a problem…that being that I had lost the end caps that kept muck & water out of the bearings…Sugru saved the day!”
Please do remember to send us photos of your hacks and repairs – we LOVE seeing them !! we’ll feature them on the gallery and the gems on the blog and oh yeah don’t forget about the hack of the month competition; we’ll feature the hack/repair of the month on the blog and send you 5 free packs of your choice to the winner… One of our friends thinks he’s going to win – please don’t let him :)

The launch party for sugru last week was a big night for us. Lots of people have been working steadily for years on sugru in the labs, at their desks and out and about testing – this was our chance to say thanks and celebrate this big milestone together… it was so cool to see all the sugru in lovely packs at last and people brought along stuff to hack on the night as well… We had a great time and I just put a bunch of photos on flikr. I met some of you that brought stuff to hack but have only just seen some of the hacks for the first time in the photos! Really loving the repaired laptop especially, and the replaced saucepan lid is pretty fab too!!

Hello Everyone.
Big Big WOW ! You swept us off our feet yesterday, we are bowled over. We sold out of our first 1000 packs of sugru (what we expected to try to sell in a month) in 6 hours. We were blogged on some of our favourite blogs including BoingBoing,Wired and Core77. We can hardly believe it!! Today we are busy packing your orders and will start shipping them tomorrow. We’re also working hard for the private launch party tonight (which is now a little late for itself!). AND we have also started production of the next 1000 packs of sugru – we’ll keep you posted on that ! Big Big thanks everyone for the most awesome days of our lives !!!

Today the gadget inspectors reviewed sugru for the daily telegraph! Looks like it stood up pretty well to their scrutiny.. phew!

These are from two different sugru users: Paul says his wife picked this pot up about 20 years ago in a flea market, and it’s their favourite pasta pot because it’s nice and heavy. The bakelite handle cracked off and he enjoyed repairing it while keeping the crack! Same goes for Dave’s knives – he’s loved them and used them for years, the cracks are part of them now.

Scott Burnham has just published a really interesting paper about the growth of hacking culture. Download it from his blog here!

Our twitter name is @projectsugru, you should follow us!

We had no-where on our bathroom sink to keep soap so James hacked the sink with these swee-eet brackets! We made some over the kitchen sink then too, but we didn’t always have soap there – then they came into their own when the fairy started getting low! lovely unintentional invention !

Materials maven Chris Lefteri invited sugru to host a hackwarium at 100% Materials in Earls Court on saturday. Thanks to everyone who came along! It was great craic hacking and repairing with you! Most definite highlights were the padded clamp and the broken vase repaired in the shape of lips :D

The BBC lunchtime news featured sugru today! There’s an article on the technology section of their website too ! Read it here !

Loving this repair! thanks Tom!

Last weekend we brought sugru to the Electric Picnic in Ireland. Cultivate invited us to be part of the global green area at the festival and we met some great people ! (as well as getting to see the fleet foxes, florence and the machine and rodrigo y gabriela :D)
We used the weekend to chat with people about hacking, repairing and sugru and we learned that Irish people are natural hackers ! We were also chuffed to get to hang out with Anne from Rothar and eat the very yummy pizza from the Slow Food people.

For a long time, James said he loved the idea of sugru but it wasn’t for him. Then he asked for some for his bike bell… and he got hooked!

Last week the lovely people at Studio Banana, a collection of creative businesses in Madrid, invited us to hold a Hackquarium in their studio. The highlights have to be the guy that hacked his lacross stick so it doesn’t give him blisters, the lady that first said she didn’t need any sugru but then realised actually her sandal needed a hack quite badly (!) , the repaired wingmirror, and the sheer enthusiasm of the crowd. It was a great evening, and as our first official hackwarium, a big learning experience for us – thanks Studio Banana!

The pin came off Sepakes brooch, and she repaired it with sugru because she thought it would be stronger than glue, I think she could be right! sugru does stick brilliantly to ceramics, it must be said!

Earlier this year, Platform21 published the Repair Manifesto. It’s a bold call to arms and it stimulated a very big debate; they say it’s been downloaded more than a million times now. It seems the world really does want to get repairing!

I love the idea of knife magnets…and I love blobs. so there you go! I buried some magnets in blobs of sugru. simple as that!