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!

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 :)”

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!

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?

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!

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.

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 :)