Some great stuff happening in Ireland at the mo!
Green Machines is the latest exhibition in the Science Gallery in Dublin. It asks you to vote for the products and technology that have the most potential to enable more sustainable living. The selection is pretty varied with a bit of a leaning towards technology that also has a direct social impact…often in developing countries… from the ugly but amazing Adspecs glasses (surely there must be a way to make these nicer? Or maybe I’m missing something?) to the Pavegen pavement that captures walkers kinetic energy (wow, does this work does anyone know?) to the Recompute carboard PC to sugru. I’m looking forward to checking it all out next Friday when I’m over in Dublin for Science Week. Anyone been already? The show continues until 17th December. Oh and we’re delighted that the Science Gallery shop are now stocking sugru too. Our first Irish retailer

We’re chuffed to be involved in Science Week Ireland next week – It’s all about showing the exciting and creative side of science, with a not-so-subtle mission to breed more mad scientists in Ireland. Or something like that anyway. I’m going to be telling the story of sugru at the Paccar Theatre in the Science Gallery on Friday 12th Nov at 1pm. If you’re around you can book tickets here, and if you come, do stick around afterwards for a chat There’s lots of cool stuff on – TOG, the Dublin hackerspace are running workshops to show you how to design interactive devices and make your own biofuel.

A few weeks ago, I read about Eri Gentry and her friends in San Francisco. Their story got me into inspiration overdrive. They believe that the inventions and innovations to solve the world’s big problems will come not just from big companies and universities, but from creative and curious people working off their own back, in their own time, on their own ideas.
Listen up, this is really brilliant.

At the start of the recession, when lots of Biotech Companies in her local area were going belly up, Eri Gentry went shopping – she bought over $1m worth of lab equipment for $30,000 and got the kit set up and working in her garage. She invited her friends to use it, and then they invited their friends and pretty soon they had a full blown community using the lab in her garage experimenting and learning about bio technology. They call it BioCurious – and members include people that want to start their own bio-tech venture, graduates out of work, and generally curious and keen amateur biologists. They join as members, and have open access then to all the facilities and the support of the founders and community then, listen to what they have to say in this video they made to raise funding for their first years overheads on Kickstarter:

I guess a big part of why this gets me so excited is that I spent a few years myself learning and doing materials science after I had the idea for sugru. I’d studied biology at school and always loved doing scientific experiments then, but after that I went to art college and left science far behind in favour of drawing and making amusing (to me now) bikes. I had no idea that after graduating in product design years later that I would find myself in a white coat for the best part of 3 years – not a good look for me by the way!
We started our business with a small government grant, so we realised pretty much from the word go that contracting laboratory work out wasn’t realistic. Luckily for us, silicone chemistry formulation doesn’t require big bits of kit like bio tech so we were able to set up our first lab for less than £5000. After a few fun days training in the basics of laboratory work I was able to get started into formulation experiments.
Ok, it has to be said that I had a lot of help from two amazing scientists Ian and Steve, who had recently retired from top jobs in the silicone industry. Big credit to these great guys for believing in me and my dream by the way! Over the next few years, we worked together through the development of the basic chemistry and patenting, until later with a little more funding behind us we were able to start collaborating with university laboratories, specialist testing companies, science students and steadily investing in our own lab as well, until a few years ago when Tom, our now resident official materials scientist took over most of the science from me (I love it so I’m never giving all of it up!) – and then we were able to refine sugru into the great product it is today (not perfect of course though and the R&D is and I hope always will be ongoing).
Looking back I have such happy memories of this time (you know how your brain tricks you into forgetting all those hard days when nothing was going right?! Well thank god for that! ha ha). I just wish I took more pictures. Here are two I could find that make me smile !

Anyway, the point is not about me or sugru at all, but how incredibly excited I am for BioCurious and all the others like them, and what’s starting to look like a movement of citizen science. I can’t wait for the day when we hear of a groundbreaking cure or fuel or something and it’s come from a community lab like this. It’s going to happen.

How awesome is this ?!!
Britt made it with a combination of wood, polystyrene ball, apoxie and sugru. I love how thinly she’s coated the sugru on the surfaces to give them a rubbery feel on the floor, and how she’s made her own red sugru by mixing in a little bit of paint. What can I say except I want one !!
Or maybe I should get off my ass and make my own, because she’s shown us how she made it step by step over on instructables.com.

If you haven’t heard of instructables before, then boy are you in for a treat!
It’s just the most awesome DIY and How-to website in the world. This is where you can learn how to make anything from home-made kit-kat bars to bamboo bikes to southpark character doorstops now
We’re so excited to be teaming up with instructables and the king of multitools Leatherman to support a contest for the best instructable using sugru. To enter, just upload a project to instructables using sugru anytime before the 10th of October and the best projects will win some cool prizes including Leatherman CS tools, sugru and instructables pro memberships and t-shirts. There are a bunch of cool instructables already posted including the Kenny doorstop – we can’t wait to see what other awesome projects people do! Good luck!

At lunchtime today James and I had the pleasure of meeting a lively bunch of therapists at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital here in London.

For anyone that isn’t familiar with the role of an Occupational Therapist – which is most people I’d imagine – well, hmm, how can I explain!
Their job is really varied and includes much more than this, but one aspect is that they take on the challenge to help people with unique needs after suffering an accident or illness to regain their independence. They are mega creative problem solvers. As you can imagine – all kinds of everyday situations are different after you’ve had an injury so items often need to be adapted to make them easier to use, or even possible to use…and sometimes new things need to be designed from scratch.
A OT ‘making’ challenge might go like this: a keen tennis player suffers an accident and no longer has the use of one of her arms, how can you help her continue to play tennis? With materials readily available to you that are not very expensive?
Surely one of the job description requirements must be ‘hacker’ / ‘inventor’ !

Today we gave this energetic team a nice supply of sugru. Another tool for them to put in their armoury.

We learned that OTs use lots of low-melting-point thermoplastics that can be moulded after immersing in warm water….they’re pretty awesome materials…And here are two lovely simple hacks we chatted about with the team: pop rivets on a back brace softened by Robert, and a tap made more comfortable by Jason.

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 !