Sugru is great stuff. It’s like plasticine for grownups, but with a noble purpose.
It comes measured out into small portions of colourful squishiness in foil sachets. It’s very soft and malleable when fresh out of the pack, so you can mould it to just about any shape, but it dries completely hard when exposed to air, which means it’s extremely durable once in the required form. I found it a little too soft and sticky when I first took it out of the pack, so you might want to take it out and leave it sit for a few minutes before you start working with it.
I must admit, I was predisposed to like this stuff before I even got my hands on it. I picked up a similar product in a hardware shop more than a decade ago, and it was a favourite for a while, till disaster struck. (Google suggests it might be one of the products mentioned on this Wikipedia page.) This product came as hard plastic pellets that melted in hot water, then became rigid again once cooled. I used it for a number of small repairs, and to cover sharp corners and edges on various items (for example a bolt under my bike saddle that regularly snagged skirts and coats). All was well till I replaced a missing zip toggle on a coat, forgot about the melting in hot water issue, and put it through a hot wash with disastrous consequences. I slightly went off it after that.
But back to lovely, lovely Sugru, with none of the melty issues.
My first repair with it was to the lid of a bin we keep in the garden. Probably due to weather exposure, the frame of the lid is prone to cracking, and we’d already replaced it once, but when the new lid cracked a few months ago, I was able to join it back together (somewhat inelegantly) with a nice big wodge of Sugru.
It was very satisfying not to have to buy a whole entire new plastic bin and lid for the sake of one small, though critical, crack. It’ll be interesting to see how the Sugru join copes with the weather extremes this winter, but it’s been happy enough out there for the last 6 months or so.
Dave has also used Sugru to cap the decorative “spikes” on our fire guard, to avoid accidental eye-poking-out, although the kids were less interested in going anywhere near them till they went all colourful and interesting, so I question the success of that project.
One of the niftiest repairs I’ve heard of is wrapping Sugru around a screw that’s missing its nut, waiting for it to set, then unscrewing it and hey presto, you have a new nut that’s a perfect match to the tread of the screw. How clever is that?
