Sugru?

This stuff looks cool. I saw Sugru mentioned on Instructables, and had to check it out. I really like the handmade look of the Sugru website. Very low-stress website.

illustrations of various uses for Sugru, from their site.Sugru is moldable silicone that sticks to metal, leather, ceramics and glass, and cures into flexible, weatherproof silicone. It’s designed to help you fix broken things, or hack your stuff to make it better. People make stamps with it, too! It’s an open-ended substance, and I think the developers are interested in new uses. They give 5 packs away to the “Hack of the Month.”

Sugru can be used to add grip to slippery things. You can texture it. It sticks to itself and lots of other things. You can mold new shapes onto things, like grips or bumpers. You can plug holes, and repair cracks. You can customize the fit of shoes. It insulates, so you can use it on hot and cold things that you need to touch. It’s silicone, so it withstands extreme temperatures.

Bike uses for Sugru?

Has anyone used Sugru for bicycle repairs or hacks? I saw in a video one guy was putting it on thumbshifters. I could see putting a thin layer on metal brake levers to keep them from freezing the bejeezus out of your fingers.

Aha. It looks like a Friend of Sugru used it to create mounts for his bike bell, cyclometer, and rear blinkie.  Maybe also patching a hole in a fender (I have a couple of those, from moving the stays).  I really like the location of his bell – right on top of his mtb brake lever mount.

Another person fixed what looks like a Regal saddle with Sugru.

Get Sugru?

You can buy it from Sugru.com. | And you can make it yourself out of pure silicone and corn starch.

 

Brooks saddle repaired!

Thanks to Bill Laine at Wallingford for the magic tip. The nose bolt on a Brooks isn’t held in by anything but tension. A little light tapping and prying had the whole thing slide apart.

New rivets, a couple hammers, a nail-set and a chisel, and the saddle seems functional again! The chisel split the hollow part of the rivet, and the nail-set peened the pieces over firmly. At the end, I went at the rivets with the wedge-part of the smaller hammer.

I thought I’d start with two across from each other, but it worked best to start with the one to the right of a bag loop (second from the corner), then start working my way across. It took too much pull to line up the leather hole with the cantle hole for the rivet.

The last rivet I had to sort of lever into place with the scratch awl through the hole.

The corner rivets were the hardest by far to really set well, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they ease up a little from completely flush in the future.

The saddle looks a little more scuffed than it did to start with, and there are rivet-dents in the piece of wood I used to protect the marble top of my typesetting bench. After I noticed the scruffs and scrapes in the marble… I started out using the metal rail, but got kind of carried away.

Brooks repair question!

Does anyone know how to get the nose bolt out of a Brooks saddle? The ~14mm nut seems to be attached to the bolt, and the whole thing turns and turns. Nothing seems to be unscrewing from anything else, and there’s nothing to grab onto that isn’t the nut.

Brooks B72 saddle repair, originally uploaded by BikeTinker.

I intend to put a new frame on Angelina’s Brooks B72. I bought the saddle from a fellow on the RBW list, broke a rail, fixed it with a sleeve, broke the other rail, fixed it with another sleeve, and then the whole bottom part gave way. Another fellow on the RBW list gave me a B72 with wrecked leather.

It’s finally time to put the two saddles together, so I drilled out the rivets and got ready to do it, but I can’t figure out how to remove the nose piece.

I don’t want to drill out the nose rivets – I’d like to move the nose, bolt and hardware right over to the other chassis.