Hack of the Month!

The winner this month is to Joshua in North Carolina for not only hacking his car better but showing us all a beautiful technique for forming precise sugru parts.

“With my satellite antenna taken apart by a rampant car wash and us not using satellite radio anyway, I replaced the bare antenna with a sugru covered screw. I placed the screw in a drill, applied sugru, and spun it while forming with soap covered fingers, as if on a potter’s wheel. I also used the turning drill to carve a concave shape for the base with an exacto knife. It was amazing! I’ve posted a full step by step on instructables.”

Awesome – congrats Joshua! 5 packs of sugru and a Hack Things Better t-shirt will be winging their way to you very soon.

For a chance to win Hack of the Month yourself, just get some sugru , hack some stuff and send us some photos for a chance to win!

It’s usually hard to choose the hack of the month. Not this time though.

Listen up, this one’s from Walt in West Virginia.

“I used sugru to fix an old soldering iron cord a while back, and that made me happy.  Then I gave some to a friend so he could fix his mobile phone power cord, and that made him happy (more than the tape he was using).

Then I used it for something that made me real happy.

I have a son who is bedridden and fed through a tube, surgically implanted into his stomach through his abdomen.  After a couple of months one of the connectors always seems to come apart at the same place. (He’s had a PEG tube for nearly 10 years).

When this happens, we have been told to get a new one from his doctor.  This is time consuming and seems very wasteful.

I start using superglue (ca glue) every week (that’s about all it will last) to reconnect the parts.  Then after about a month of that we have to see his doctor to get a new tube. (a process that takes only a few minutes, however the hour drive to the office, the long wait for our turn and the hour drive home is very uncomfortable for my son).

The last time the tube came apart was about 6 months ago.  I began with the weekly dose of superglue.  Five or six weeks later I remembered the sugru packets on my shelf.  I didn’t make it fancy and photogenic like all the beautiful pictures of the hacks on your site.  But it has been holding for more than 4 months now and is showing no sign of letting go.

(My magsafe connector is next)”

Every month we have a contest to choose the Hack of the Month from all the pictures and stories you send us. The winner gets 5 Super Packs of sugru, and now a HTB tee as well (see pic below!). We publish the winners in our email newsletter at the beginning of every month, and lots of them have been truly awesome! But because they go on the newsletter, they don’t always make it onto the blog as well so I thought it’d be cool to do a bit of a roundup and show a bunch of these beauties here on the blog. Which is your favourite?

“My iphone had developed cracks on the back surface which really annoyed me – and made me worry they would spread. Rather than buy a case or just tape it together I got creative with the sugru! If you had yellow and red sugru rather than green and orange it would have been closer to the mondrian style – but I really like it as it is.” — Matthew, UK. It’s really cool how he started out with a problem, and then just kept on going turning it into a whole new design… it’s fearless! (and great skills too)

“I have a problem with pointy-toed shoes: I always manage to tear up the toes within 10 minutes of putting them on. I am particularly attached to this pair, so I tried covering up the destroyed bits with shoe polish, permanent marker, nail polish… Eventually, though, something stronger was needed. I sugrued them and so far so good!” — Erin, France.

“My water sprinkler was shooting too high…. here’s the solution!” John, Scotland. This is just so simple, and makes the most of sugru’s adhesive and waterproof possibilities – pretty clever isn’t it?

We were touched by this lovely subtle one … “Here’s my silencer for a “play a sound” kid’s book which was just too loud for snuggle up bed time, so I silenced the three little vents where the sound came out. It’s still perfectly audible, but much gentler and not so raucous for bed time reads. Deirdre, Ireland. Nice, eh?

And the combination of materials and finish on this one were what really got us! “This is my camera. It takes good pictures but it has a lousy grip. So i hacked it with brass (bone), wood (flesh) and sugru (skin) and made a grip that fits in my hand and which is detachable in order to be able to change the battery. Now i can take better pictures because its less shaky and get less tired at the same time. I think i couldn’t have done this without sugru ” Hans, Zurich.

Along with 5 Super packs of sugru, Hack of the Month winners now get a Hack Things Better t-shirt as well

Just submit your pictures and stories to hacks@sugru.com by the last day of each month to be in with a chance, and lots of the pics go on the sugru gallery as well to keep us all inspired. Keep ‘em coming, I can’t wait to see what comes next !

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!

I met Alvin at the Maker Faire last weekend, and he said he wanted to try adding phosphorescent powder to sugru to make it glow in the dark – well he tried it and this the result!

He says: “I tried out the glow powder. I added a relatively large volume of orange glow phosphorescent powder to a pack of orange sugru. After it hardened, there was some loss in elasticity as compared with “unpowdered” sugru. The glow picture is overexposed and the actual glow is more muted but it’s noticeable.”
So so cool! Alvin, is the loss of elasticity enough to be a problem, or is it ok?

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

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!