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 :)”

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?

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 !!

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 !

Pepijn used sugru to improve his tea infuser:
It always slipped when I tried squeezing the handle. Not anymore!

Philip showed us these photos from his most recent project, he found this goats skull on the Scottish Isle of Islay and brought it home:

“We used polyfilla to fill in the roof of the mouth (we thought it would be a good white product to fill the big area). It was kind of like being a dentist making a brace (or so it felt). Once this was going on I painted the picture frames backing board with blackboard paint. We wanted the skull to have maximum impact on the black. Then it was a layer of Sugru (we probably used more than we needed but the shape was nice and smooth to follow between the polyfilla and the board). The skull isn’t light but it seems like the Sugru is more than up for the job.”

It really does look very striking. I must say I’m a little nervous about the weight of the skull, but Philip says it’s holding up fine, I think the bone must be a lot lighter than it looks!
Please don’t try this with heavy objects!

sugru is developed to stick to things, but, sometimes it’s useful if it doesn’t stick.
So what can you do?
Wetting the surface you don’t want it to stick to with soapy water works very well and doesn’t leave a greasy residue like it would if you used oil. But don’t cover your eReader in soapy water. Or oil.
Eleanor used cling film to make this:
I used cling-film on the eReader to stop the Sugru sticking and more on a flat surface so I could press the outer face flat. The result is dust protection for the eReader ports, extra protection for the corners, and a happy me!

Brilliant one John!
The water sprinkler was shooting too high. The solution…

Did it yesterday and it cured this morning. Amazing stuff, the ideas flow with the possession of having some.

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!

Andrea: “I just fixed a tear on the front of some vintage bike shoes I have. The sugru looks awesome.”
Nice one Andrea! now I’m hoping one of my shoes is going to get a hole so I can do that puncture patch repair, it’s cool!

Doug says: “sugru worked great on my tramping boots. They are really comfortable and were quite costly five years ago but I didn’t look after them very well and so the leather cracked and broke where the foot bends up after I let the boots get wet and then dried them too fast. This meant that water and mud gets in when I go down to feed the horses, especially now during the New Zealand Winter when it is so wet and muddy. Now no water or mud gets in and it (almost) looks like the boots haven’t been changed unless you know and look really closely. As you can see, I have used them a lot since I fixed them and there is lots of mud all over them. I was initially worried that the sugru that is inside the boots (to give the repair some strength) might be uncomfortable but I was able to shape the sugru to my foot (by wearing the boots) before it dried and so now the boots are even more comfortable!

Olivier posted this on the sugru facebook page yesterday, his first sugru repair – I love that he chose to use orange on blue trainers – loud and proud!

OH, word of warning! in case anyone’s thinking to rush off and repair the ends of their shoes with sugru – don’t ! it’s not strong enough for soles of shoes, it’ll wear through when you walk on it. Seems like it’s really good for uppers tho!

Thanks Luke for the title suggestion :) The last few days have been amazing to see so many people sending back their ‘first hacks’ – we’re so stoked that so many people are getting stuck into their packs as soon as they get them, and some of them are damn clever as well. Here are a few first hack beauties !

Aaron: “My iMac’s in a setup where it’s nearly impossible to look behind it to access the ports when I need to plug something in and due to it’s slightly unusual placement it’s not very easy to rotate either. So I tried something out with my first pack of Sugru to add ‘braille’ coded bumps over the ports so I can tell which is which purely by touch.”

Hamish: “My iPhone’s headphones’ rubber coating was starting to come off, and since I recognised from past experience that the jack was also about to go, while reinforcing both of these I also added a piece of double-sided Velcro so I’d have an integrated cable-tie!”

Matthew and Luke both repaired their laptops – I love how two completely separate people did the same repair and both chose orange !!
Luke also repaired his adaptor: “one of the handy flippy-out ear tabs on the mains adaptor, which allow you to coil the cable neatly, snapped off a while ago, leaving me to wrap the cord around the body of the adaptor – which is a pain. So I’ve moulded a new ear into the space left by the broken-off part and am hoping that when it has fully cured that it will actually work. Couldn’t resist inlaying some left-over sugru into the recessed apple logo on the adaptor to coordinate the whole thing with the laptop…”

Chris dove in and made his first ever hack – repaired his snapped curtain rail !

Brilliant ! What’s going to be your first sugru hack?

I love seeing repairs of things that look like well worn favourites, like this one from Lene.
“One day a part of my ring was missing! I was really happy when I first saw sugru, because I missed you”….. how sweet is that? :)
Decent colour match 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 !

Inspired by these, Matthew made this awesome framed mount for his fossil. He explains how he did it:
“I used two 5g packets of black Sugru to make a custom mount for a fossil specimen I got at the Tucson gem and mineral show last February. I put three screws into the wood backboard to give the Sugru something to hold onto. Then I covered the fossil edges in plastic wrap to keep the Sugru from sticking. After I formed the Sugru around the screws and over the edges of the fossil I let it dry overnight. I finished by sliding the fossil out, removing the plastic, and sliding the fossil back in. Fits like a glove.”

Awesome Matthew!

LOVE it !!

nice work Ruairi!

Ken sent back this clever little hack – love it !