Waste less, Live more Week (22-28 Sept) is Keep Britain Tidy’s annual awareness week which this year will bring together people and organisations who plan to host a week of events around the 2014 theme - Be Resourceful. Sounds good? Well get involved then!
Source: http://loveyourstuff.sugru.com/
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Well, that may be a little overstated but it can fix a great deal...
I had always wanted – after rescuing it – to somehow resurrect this lovely old trowel but there just was no material around bar, eventually, making a new handle and with the kind of trowel that it is, where the tool sits in the handle and not the handle in the tool, so to speak, this is always a difficult task.
So the poor trowel sat around moping until sugru arrived and I attempted a repair only with sugru. However, as there was a large deep crack in the top of the handle that went for quite a way it did not directly work and also not because the handle had a deep patina from use and the fact that with some wood it is best to roughen it up a little with sandpaper.
That still left the crack and sugru, together with Gorilla Glue, sorted that and the trowel has become now useful and usable again.
sugru® is a new self-setting rubber that bonds to most other materials. You form it by hand into any shape, apply it and make it into what you want it to be, and overnight it turns into a strong, flexible silicone rubber.
Only a generation or two ago, it was natural and obvious to repair something when it broke and to adapt something if it wasn’t quite right. It just made sense! The illusion of a never-ending supply of new things in recent decades has caused us to forget how to mend things.
sugru® was invented to get the world fixing and making again. From patching up hiking boots, to protecting iPhones with rubber bumpers, to customising the grips on sports equipment, it provides a versatile and easy-to-use solution for even those who’ve never fixed things before. Its flexibility and adhesiveness to all kinds of materials - from leather to wood to plastics - means that it can be used to make all kinds of products better.
The idea is catching on and sugru is now used by nearly 500,000 people from 151 countries around the world, whilst Forbes.com call sugru ‘21st Century Duct Tape’, and TIME magazine listed it as one of the top 50 inventions of 2010.
An 8 x 5g multi-colour pack of sugru retails at £11/$18/€15 at www.sugru.com
sugru® was invented by Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh who is also the CEO of sugru, the exciting new self-setting rubber for fixing, modifying, and improving your stuff. Originally from Ireland, Jane studied at the Royal College of Art in London, where she had an idea that led to the first version of sugru in 2003. While there, she imagined a world where this magic material existed and set out to make it a reality.
Six years and 8,000 lab hours later, the formula for sugru was complete. Made in London, sugru launched in December 2009 and its community of users has continued to grow, reaching over 500,000 customers worldwide.
Jane is passionate about promoting a culture of creativity and resourcefulness, and sees it as an antidote to the throwaway mindset. Her mission is hitting a chord with the growing number of people looking to live more sustainably whilst doing what they love.
© 2014
Full Disclosure Statement: The GREEN (LIVING) REVIEW received no compensation for any component of this article.
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
This I did recently with a very old garden trowel were the top of the handle had a rather large crack in it and also where at other places the wood was a little, or a little more even, rough and cracked.
Initially I tried to use sugru to fill the crack of the handle and then cap it with the same material but, alas, because of the state of the crack this did not work. So a couple of experiments later I filled it with Gorilla Glue and this entirely repaired the crack and, as the glue hardens to such an extent that it can also be sanded the handle was almost as good as new at that area. I could, I know, have used the traditional method of repairing cracks in wood, such as wood glue mixed with sawdust but I neither had sawdust not wood glue to hand.
Then came sugru into use as a cap over the crack and at the bottom end where the trowel is fitted into the handle and, voila, it is, once again, a useable trowel that is also safe for the hands of the user.
Often all it takes to make an old handle useable again and safe so as not to end up with splinters is to sand it down and wax or oil lit but applying sugru at certain points makes it still better and, at the same time, makes it look a little more colorful and that way it can also be spotted easier when put down.
I could have added also, as the picture below shows, grip improvements but am quite happy with the way it is as it is now though.
Old tools often are much better quality and better design than many of the cheap and cheerful modern ones; and the cheap is in quality only and not in price more often than not.
© 2014
