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 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 !!

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 !

Clare (the inventor of the trabasack – check it out) has a disability that makes it difficult to hold her blackberry so she made this little handle for it from wire, leather and velcro… and now sugru! The sugru makes the handle generally more robust and stops it catching in things so easily as when it was raw wire. Cool texture too!

Kent is an awesome maker we met at Bay Area Maker Faire. Here he shows how to make an ipad stand that turns it into a neat little desktop that can be angled as you like:

I wanted to add a suction cup from a Garmin GPS system to a PanaVise base. The ball was too small to clamp into the PanaVise so I added a coating of sugru to size it up larger.

I covered the sugru with a plastic wrap so it would not adhere to the jaws of the PanaVise. I placed the plastic wrapped sugru into the PanaVise jaws and tightened to shape the sugru, and carefully removed the plastic wrap.

The PanaVise iPad holder – I now have a way of holding the iPad higher and at any angle I want.

Inspired !
Kent’s website is http://www.kentkb.com, check it out!

Minnibird kindly gave this lovely guy a whole new ear and a whole new leg. Lovely !

Imagine what it’s like to live with a disability. If you’ve got a condition that makes it difficult for you to get around, not only do you have to cope with the difficulties associated with your condition, but to add insult to injury, you also often have to live with poorly designed equipment that you keep looking at and wondering why can’t look as nice as the rest of the stuff you buy?

Denise Stephens is one of the most inspiring people I’ve met. In 2003, when she was 24, she was diagnosed with MS, which meant that she found it increasingly difficult to get around without crutches. The crutches and other equipment she was given were a lifeline and she was so glad to get it on one hand, but on the other hand whenever friends were coming round to visit, she found herself hiding it because it was so ugly and stigmatised. She thought “Surely this can’t be just the way it is…”

She began to grow concerned that people with disabilities were missing out on the pleasure that comes with good design aesthetics. “I get the impression that people are opting out on the opportunity to use things that could be really useful to them, purely because they look a certain way,” she says. “For example, someone who uses a hearing aid may think, ‘I don’t want to wear that’, because they don’t like the look of it.”
She says she has always been interested “in the aesthetics of things”, and that looking at the limited equipment available made her wonder why something being practical meant it couldn’t also be a “fun, inspiring” design. “It’s as if it’s looked like this for 50 years and no one’s even changed it,” she says. “I think one of the ultimate experiences I had that made me take a step back was when I was in hospital and I was offered a Zimmer frame. At that time, I was 25. It probably sounds really vain, but I didn’t want that. It’s all these little different experiences that made me think, ‘I wish I could do something.”

So she did.

In 2008 she won the Social Innovation Camp award for her idea Enabled by Design, which over the last 2 years, with steely focus, she has built into a thriving online community of people passionate about fun, practical and good design solutions for people with a disability. Denise and Enabled by Design embody the empowering spirit of life hacking – people taking control of their problems and finding clever solutions on their own terms. The website has a Loves / Hates section and people share tips and ideas that have worked for them. EbD is a breath of fresh air.
Tomorrow Denise and her Team are hosting a 1 day unconference at London Design Museum. Their aim is to ‘reframe the ageing and disability debate by focusing on Design for All‘. A very ambitious goal, but they’ve proven they are intent and on their way to achieving it. Wayne Hemmingway and Charles Leadbeater are the keynote speakers at the event tomorrow, but there will also be workshops, seminars and breakout sessions bringing an incredibly diverse range of ideas and fresh perspectives. There are a few tickets still available, so grab them while you can !

We’re really excited to be hosting a HACKquarium during the lunch break tomorrow, so if you’re coming, bring along something to hack!

Mag was driving last week when here iTrip connection started shorting out… she discovered a loose cable. That could have been just a simple sugru fix, but look what happened instead !!
“Fortunately I had Sugru in my purse, …what modern girl doesn’t? I cut open the package with my multi-tool (also in my purse) and started the repair. Since I’d happened to have written a blog post earlier that morning about the fantastic phosphorescent hack featured on the Sugru blog, it occurred to me that black-on-black repairs have no drama. So I took some eyeshadow out of my purse and rubbed it into the Sugru surface, creating an iridescent finish. I love the look!
I had extra Sugru left over so I hacked the back of my iPhone case with a Tree of Life design to give it more grippiness, and once again iridescent-ized the finish. It’s a great way to sex up a monochromatic Sugru hack don’t you think?”
I think it looks fantastic Mag! How is it holding up to wear? Does the eyeshadow bind into the sugru surface?
Love it !!

We are about as excited as we’ve ever been in our lives this week. Why? We’re going to Bay Area Maker Faire! It’s on this weekend and, well, this has always been a dream for us. We’re pinching ourselves…

If you’re in the San Francisco area, come and see us! We’ll be in the MakerSHED, and we’ll have a demo / hacking workshop area with lots of sugru for you to try out there and then. Dig out those things waiting to be hacked and repaired and bring them along – we’ll give you enough sugru to do your project there and then. We may even have a few prizes for best hacks ;-)

And, well, how could we refuse an amazing opportunity to work with the supreme hackers at our favourite magazine in the world…. we’ve worked round the clock recently to make a limited number of packs for MAKE (on top of the sugru stock we’re building for sugru.com) that you’ll be able to buy from MakerSHED at the Faire.

VOLUNTEERS WANTED Come help us out at the sugru stall
The crowds will be huge, so we’re looking people to join us in our hacking area to show the masses how sugru works. If you’d like to help people hack and make with sugru over the weekend, and meet other sugru fans, we have a few free MF passes for volunteers – email me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) if you’d like to help — even for just a few hours! We’d love to meet you :)

(Finally, as you can see from our timeline, we’re getting DARN CLOSE now. That means more exciting announcements soon.)

Jamie emailed me that he adapted the grip of his Sony a200 DLSR to make it easier and more comfortable to hold.
He explains: “You see, camera manufacturers think that cheap cameras should only be bought by people with small hands and the rest of us can just upgrade to their pro range of cameras. Or, you could sugru-ify your entry-level camera! I decided to improve the finger grip (particularly around the little finger) and fill out the palm rest to provide a bit more stability — I’m even more concerned about the ergonomics since my wrist is only out of a cast since last week.”
You can see lots more pics and the extra hacks he did with the bit left over on his blog.
I think it fair to say a fair few of us would chirp up… SURE it’s a jolly great hack but WHY OH WHY did you use orange and green?!?
“Well, I could have used black but there’s no point in hacking something unless everyone notices it. I’m sure it’ll make a good ice-breaker at a photo walk (and it also makes it damn obvious which camera is mine!).”

Jonathan emailed me this other lovely camera hack: “This is one of my father’s camera’s. He does nature photography all over the place. In some of those places, it’s raining or snowing all the time. Though the camera is weather proof, the shutter cable isn’t. It had the wire ripped out from over-use. Sugru saved the day!”

Adan plays the ukelele. He also makes ukelele’s. And he and sells them on etsy.
“I’ve been trying to play along with Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which requires either a soprano ukulele or a baritone ukulele capoed at the 5th fret to simulate the soprano-ness of it all. The capo I had on hand was bulky and obstructive when used in this manner, so I bought a new capo over the weekend, a low-profile one designed by Ned Steinberger and made by Planet Waves. It’s pretty slick, and pretty sleek, and allows for very precise clamp force control to prevent over-clamping and pitch increase… but unfortunately is unable to close tight enough to clamp around the extra-thin neck of our uke. So I added some Sugru. Here’s my hand wrapped around it into a “B7” chord shape… plus five half steps!”

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!

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?

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!

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.

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.