It’s a big day for sugru!
From today, you can buy sugru not only from us here at sugru.com but also from the Design Museum shop in London. We’re absolutely chuffed to be working with the lovely team at the shop, and we’re particularly heartened because they already use sugru! When I popped by earlier to chat and take this picture, Alice let me know that she has already hacked her bike lights and the office scissors :)

Here at sugru.com is a great place to buy sugru, because you can connect with us and the other hackers and repairers in the sugru community, as well as get support, inspiration and tips for new ideas or techniques.
But not everyone will find sugru here, so that’s where great independent retailers (such as the Design Museum Shop) come in! …the kind that understand their customers needs, help them out and introduce them to new things.

If you work in such a special shop or know a shop owner like this whose customers you think need sugru, then we’d love to hear from you!
We’re looking for a select number of retailers initially, from all kinds of communities and market sectors, who have a shared passion for repairing and hacking and who can work with us to reach new communities. We’re excited to work with all kinds of shops – from computer repair shops to bike shops to homeware stores, outdoor or farm suppliers – whatever! If that sounds like you, or someone you know, we’d love to hear from you. Initially we will be working with retailers here in the UK and Ireland, and working towards growing internationally early next year.

We are so excited to meet and work with more people like the team at the Design Museum, and here’s to the first of many shop launches !!

Rainer from Austria told us about how he tested out sugru on his very cool looking remote control car. He has a Company Hurrax Experts that make RC cars and are nuts about everything to do with these crazily tough and durable little machines :) If, like me, you don’t know anything about tough little cars that seem to move on their own, have a look at their youtube video and see them climbing up steps and stuff!
These things are put through some really tough terrain, so let’s hope sugru is up to the job!

Check out his car without the body on – he blitzed it !

Rainer says:
1. I added to the top of the body-mounts to have a softer contact area
2. I prevented the front body-mounts from moving left/right
3. I hopefully fixed my leaking gasoline-tank (I know that sugru is not fuel-proof, but since it is only in contact with fuel when the car is upside down (which shouldn’t happen THAT often, I hope it will be good enough). I just covered a rubber-plug, it’s not all sugru.
4. I added a buffer between the roll cage and the exhaust (just stuck to the cage)
5. I added a buffer to the area where the spring deflection limiter hits the shock tower

So….! After putting it to the test out there, how did it hold up?
“Well… we had some fun today… ;) My sugru-hacks worked fine for the most part, it just didn’t stick to the fuel tank. It still sticks fine to the rubber seal though, so I’ll probably try a different strategy there….
Interestingly, the spring-deflection-limiter hack seems to hold – and I did put quite a stress on it, as you can see in the pictures. The car weighs in between 20 to 23kg – so even if the jumps may not look spectacular, its entirely different when you’re only two meters away when this baby lifts off. Actually, hitting the ground (or the wall… don’t ask) is the scary part ;)”

So 4 out of 5 seem to be working well for now….awesome! Keep us posted Rainer on any more updates on this!

It’s instinctive to more and more of us, if something doesn’t work properly, it needs improving !
I mean, why would you live with niggles and annoyances when you can do a better job?
And if you can imagine a better design, why not just go ahead and make it?
Plus. There’s the post-hack basking in the glory of your cleverness and handiness.

The more people that improve and redesign their own stuff, the more other people can see their ideas and improvements, and eventually designers and manufacturers will start to take notice and the improvements that we make may start to influence the next generation of products, so maybe it’ll contribute to crowdsourcing design insights. That would be awesome!
Even more exciting than that though, is spreading the culture of problem solving, of taking action and improving. If we think like that about the stuff we live with, there’s a good chance we’ll be in a problem solving / improving frame of mind and can apply that to bigger and more important problems too.

Here are some cool design-improving hacks that people have done recently:
Gunnar from Germany made his ipod shuffle work better: “I hate the fact that you can only use the bad apple earphones with the ipod shuffle because the controls for the mp3player are built into the headphones cable. Since i wanted to use my normal headphones, i resoldered the apple headphones and insulated the wires using sugru. Now i can plug anything to it and still use the apple controls”

I’m guessing the second headphones was to eliminate wires between ipod and headphones – which is an awesome project! – but I don’t know for sure – Gunnar is that right?

David in Seattle made his camera work better: “I’ve always had a hard time turning on my Canon S90 camera because the power button is the same size and shape as the function button so you have to really look at it to know which one you are pressing.” Nice one David!

Marcel from the Netherlands improved his car straps to protect his car: “I hacked my tie down straps on the side flanks to protect my car roof while strapping tight my kayak. You can be as careful as possible but the metal fasteners will sometimes scrape the paint off your car and damage it.”

Cay improved the design of her tent pegs! “I like to travel light so I don’t carry a hammer to drive them home. My solution is to put a soft sugru top on my tent pegs – much easier on my hands :)”

James here at sugru made these gorgeous hooks recently. We all instantly fell in love with them so he made an instructable to show us all how to make them for ourselves! Are they cute or what ?
My eyes are peeled for nice twigs now … I want to make some of these on the back of the office door…

San Francisco gallery YBCA has an exhibition running at the moment that sounds just up our street ! Called TechnoCRAFT: Hackers, Modders, Fabbers, Tweakers and Design in the Age of Individuality, it features projects like this awesome Rocket Bike project by Cyclecide and furniture hacks by Eames Hack Team.

The blurb for the show says:
The history of craft and design began with individuals making what they could not afford to buy, which created a deep and personal connection between owner and object. With the Industrial Revolution, the tradition of craft mostly disappeared as people became enamored with the abundance and affordability of mass-produced, high-quality goods. The rise of mass-production and mass-consumerism undeniably elevated the average person’s quality of life. However, the cultural sameness that materialized, combined with the loss of individual connection to objects, left many feeling dissatisfied. As a result, they took matters into their own hands. 

Hooray !
Certainly sounds like it’s worth checking out, any of you in that neck of the woods!

Morten in Norway softened the corners of this concrete block to make it safer for his son playing in the garden:
“The inexplicable concrete block in the middle of our new garden is now not such a mortal danger to my son (Magnus, 2, in the background, doing what he does best – falling down) any more. His first faceplant, a week ago, needed stitches.” I wondered if the sugru would be soft enough to provide enough cushioning and asked Morten what he thought…
“We thought about this too, and concluded that bruises are preferable to holes in the head. I actually think sugru’s hardness is more or less spot on, and am using it to childproof other sharp edges around the house & garden.”
It’s a simple and potentially great use for sugru if it works well, has anyone else tried something like this?

Sometimes lovely smooth surfaces are great, but sometimes you need some extra grip, or you just want a more unusual or unique look.
With the help of a little soapy water to prevent it sticking, you can emboss or stamp your sugru with all kinds of textures before it’s cured. Watch the video to see how.

Oh and it’s fun as well to think of unusual things to use as texturing tools – you can find them everywhere when you start looking… we’ve seen people use the heads of screws, the tops of pens and even the soles of trainers!
Any more texture tool tips?

This month the standard was so high that we just couldn’t choose one Hack from all the submissions so…..
We broke the rules and selected three and they’ll each get two super packs each :)
There were many more that were right up there making it more difficult than ever to choose – thanks to everyone who sent in pictures, a huge number of them are fantastic and will be making it up onto the blog, gallery and sugru flickr over the coming weeks – so look forward to lots of inspiration!
Here are the winning 3!

Jeremy fixed his 94 year old car with sugru:

“I fixed a leak I had on the radiator of my 1916 ford racing car. It had rusted and made a hole so I made the hole bigger to get rid of the rust on the edges, then I pushed sugru into the hole and flattened it out top and bottom to make a plug. And it works perfectly! It is not a pressurised system so it is safe. The photo of the car about half way through a 500 mile rally to Ireland and back.” This hack really stood out because of just how special the car is and the fact that such a modest little repair could keep it going… awesome !

Justin hacked a screw head onto his PanaVise for quick adjusting. This is so clever! I just know this idea is going to come in handy around here :)

And Sanders great repurposing of his old thermos (as featured on last weeks blogpost ‘Why we hack no.1’) has us completely inspired!

Congrats all 3 and do watch out for the many more great hacks and repairs that have been submitted as they make their way up onto the blog and gallery, there’s some real inspiring stuff. Looking forward to the next month now!

Now that there are more and more of us saving and improving stuff with sugru (yay), it feels like a good time to reconnect here on the blog with the reasons why we do it.

At the heart of why we invented sugru is to give us a way to stand up to and beat the throwaway mindset, the attitude that assumes we should be replacing and ‘updating’ our stuff even when it’s working well or even perfectly. Clearly, the damage to the environment is shocking, but the other thing that’s not so often spoken about that is damaged by this mindset is more fundamental, and goes deep too. It might sound silly but I think the level of respect and appreciation we have for our things, and what they allow us to do, plays an important role in the richness of our experience of the world and how we connect with it.
It’s the ride on the bike you’ve owned for years, that you’ve maintained and improved when it needed it. It’s the 70’s handbag you found at the back of your Mum’s wardrobe, that whenever you use it you imagine her using it when she was your age. It’s the baby chair that’s been passed round the cousins, and is now into it’s second generation of the family, that you sat in when you were a kid and now you’re feeding your own in it.
Our lives are somehow punctuated by the things we live with, and they live longer than we do in the end. They help tell the stories of who we were, and who we are now… to others but even more so to ourselves.

Old thermos repurposed as an awesome vase by Sander in Estonia.

As any maker and hacker knows, the connection you feel to something you’ve made or modified goes deep. There’s the thrill of the idea, and the achievement in having made it work, but on top of that there’s a bloody great satisfaction in having done it yourself. The more things in the world with this quality of connection, the better.

I know I’m preaching to the converted here and of course sugru is only a tiny part of achieving this but I’m betting we’ll see a direct correlation between the number of people making, hacking and DIYing, and the eventual marginalisation of the consumerist throwaway mindset. Of course it’s a long long term thing, but seeing the attitude and energy that the sugru users have already to extending the life of their things and making them better for them, I’m feeling positive.

One of my biggest bugbears is uncomfortable shoes. So often you spend lots of money on a pair of beauties and then they bite you with blisters and end up sitting in the cupboard for months. What a pain.
Now sugru isn’t a miracle cure-all and it definitely won’t help if your shoes are uncomfy because they’re too small, but last year I had a lovely (and expensive) pair of shoes that sat had sat in the cupboard for a whole year because of a piece of sewing on the inside that gave me nasty blisters. I smoothed it out with sugru, and the shoes are now so well worn they’re my old favourites. Result!

After some of you wrote back to me saying you’d done the same thing (like Harriet’s high heels, and Hamish’s vegetarian boots below), we thought, let’s make a video and spread the shoe hacking word!
Now our neighbours will know why we were dancing so strangely on the pavement outside the office that day :)

It’s true ! you see those blue grips on Jim’s ski poles? yes, they’re sugru!!

Jim has just come back from trekking to the North Pole and sent us this amazing picture.
“The sugru helped because the ski pole handles were fairly thin and shapeless, it helped me grasp the poles, especially as I was wearing big mittens. We were lucky with the weather and missed two big storms. That meant that our average temperature was only around minus 20C. It actually felt quite warm when we were moving around!”

Big up Jim on a truly awesome achievement !!

Fed up with the assumption that development ideas seem to flow in only one direction, Colombian Designer Carolina Vallejo is calling for designers, makers and do-ers in developing countries to submit ideas and proposals to help solve the problems of the first world.

The big issues she hopes can be addressed through the competition include Food Pro­duc­tion and Eat­ing Dis­or­ders, Aging Pop­u­la­tion and Low Birth rate, Immi­gra­tion and Inte­gra­tion to Soci­ety, Sus­tain­abil­ity and Over consumption.

“The Dx1W com­pe­ti­tion is addressed to the devel­op­ing coun­tries of the world: All cre­ative solu­tions depend on hav­ing a pow­er­ful idea. Whether it’s great resources, mil­i­tary, pol­i­tics or gov­ern­ment, power and size are not enough with­out hav­ing a pow­er­ful vision. The First World needs our ideas to solve their prob­lems. First World prob­lems demand Sim­ple Third World solutions. From today on The Third World will bring ideas to redesign the future of the First World.”

The Dx1W idea is a breath of fresh air, and I was lucky enough to meet Carolina recently. It was inspiring to hear her vision for developing the idea further into a Community of people working towards solving the worlds problems beyond the first world / third world way of thinking.

The question she asked “What does it mean to be a developing country anyway?” has really stuck with me.
“Among other things it means that the future is to become devel­oped. We are on our way toward devel­op­ment, and we assume that’s a great thing, but let’s stop to con­sider for a minute whether devel­oped coun­tries are some­thing we want to turn into. Are peo­ple in devel­oped coun­tries hap­pier or health­ier? Do they live a bet­ter life? Do they have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of nature and live in a bet­ter equi­lib­rium with the envi­ron­ment? Do they live in peace?”

The winning ideas from Dx1W will go on show in an exhibition in New York later this year, but this of course is just the first step, I can’t wait to see where this goes next.

Oh and if you’d like to mix colours and you’d like some help, you can download the colour guide here (PDF, 1MB).

Simon made a plug easier to pull out of the wall:
“I had been thinking of another way of making a European plug easier to pull out & was going to design something as that’s my job anyway, but then sugru appeared and I knew it was just what I needed, as having slightly crap arthritic fingers the plug was always a nightmare to pull out, until it was sugrued…. And being orange was just even better.”
It looks awesome !

Paul is a film maker and he used sugru to help him take arial footage with a kite:
“I fixed some camera attachments i have been using for kite filming, without Sugru the nuts and screws fall out and i spend ages looking for them in the grass.
We’re using the GOPRO HD Hero camera, we have been using it to film from bike handle bars to capture bike journeys for a film we’re making. We’re also using it to get arial shots of cyclists, hence the kite filming, its way to expensive to hire a helicopter so I’ve been experimenting with hinging a little camera from a kite line to capture whats below. You’re at the mercy of the wind and its direction but it a lot of fun as well.”
Here’s some of Paul’s kite filming footage !