Sugru: Glue of the future?
NWCCTV
Posts: 3,629
Has anyone heard of this yet? I was watching Outrageous Acts Of Science and it is on there. Pretty cool looking invention. I know several users here could find a use for it. https://sugru.com/
Comments
Something I have used is Sculpey. It's like dough also, until you bake it (only low temperature is needed). After baking it's hard as a rock, but not brittle. You can drill and mill it without it shattering or breaking into pieces. Pretty useful stuff. I'll have to try some Sugru also.
We've worked with Sugru before on a lark. It's like...playdoh that can be molded and then harden. And then when it hardens, it's as brittle as dried playdoh. We made little random things, and some folks made fixes for their cables, but they're definitely not reliably useful.
You are welcome to try though!
Ha! That's cute but it seems Sugru does not even stick to itself
There's a big difference between fresh Sugru and old Sugru. In my experience, fresh Sugru works as claimed (by Sugru) and old Sugru works as described by Tymkrs.
Old Sugru can be revived a bit by placing it in a small jar with a bit of acetone and leaving it to sit overnight. The jar of course needs to be air-tight. The acetone softens it up and it behaves much better. This revived Sugru still isn't as good as the fresh stuff but it's useable.
I much prefer Polymorph. The main downside to using Polymorph instead of Sugru is if the part gets hot under normal use, the Polymorph will melt again.
I use Polymorph on all sorts of things. I cover the bottom of PCBs to make them nice and flat so I can use Velcro (or similar) on the bottom of the PCB. I use it to stick servos together and to make custom servo horns.
One could easily make a small hexapod or quadruped with nothing but servos and Polymorph.
I use a heat gun with Polymorph instead of hot water. If one gets the objects being joined hot along with the Polymorph the Polymorph forms a much better bond between the objects. Polymorph will chemically merge with some plastics (like blue servo cases).
I use canned air to quickly cool Polymorph.
"I cover the bottom of PCBs to make them nice and flat so I can use Velcro (or similar) on the bottom of the PCB."
This must be the first time I have heard of anyone mounting PCB's with Velcro. Is this for some kind of wearable or what?
I do this every so often on robots when I'm not sure where I want the PCB to end up. I often use this stuff for mounting if I'm not sure where I want the PCB to be.
The last time I did this sort of thing was for a sensor prototype. The bottom of the perfboard looked like this:
I wanted to add some 3M Dual Lock to the bottom so I added some Polymorph to the bottom of the PCB to give the Dual Lock a place to stick.
Here's the board (top side) with the Dual Lock added.
It seems like a relatively easy way to hold the sensor in place.
Our hackerspace signed up for the Instructables build night, they sent it, and we used it like...two weeks later. I'm fairly sure it was within the supposed shelf life.
Polymorph, looks like the same as Instamorph. We're also not really big fans of that, at least while using it with water, haven't tried it with a heat gun yet. We found we had to use boiling water (not any cooler) and keep it right near boiling before it'd become pliable to work with. Yay burned hands! Also found that even with boiling water, the rate of melt on the pellets were so unreliable that you'd end up with large clumps here, small clumps there, thick here, thin there, etc.
I will say though that for Instamorph at least, we could have used a bandsaw on the stuff and it would have held up to it.
2c: For our projects, we haven't found anything that instamorph and sugru can do that wood can't.
Addie
That's neat. I like it. Thanks for going to the trouble of posting the pics.
I think I know what to do with my Raspberry Pi camera module now. No messing with holes and screws and such hard work.
2c: For our projects, we haven't found anything that instamorph and sugru can do that wood can't.
Addie
I bet you're a lot better working with wood now than the first time you tried to make something with wood. Like wook, polymorph takes some getting used to. IMO Polymorph is the next best thing to plywood for building robots.
There are plenty of things one can do with Polymorph which wood can't do (at least not easily).
Making nice springy landing gear with captured nuts.
Stacking servos together to make a three axis monstrosity.
Well it would have probably looked better with wood but the above gizmo was really easy to make with Polymorph. Plus it was a lot of fun to make.
I also thought Polymorph was hard to use the first time I tried using it. It took some practice to learn how to use it without burning my fingers or having things fall apart as I reheated a section.
Heat capacity is a big deal with Polymorph. Always squish any unused Polymorph thin so it's easier to melt next time. I once left my extra Polymorph in a block. That thing took forever to remelt.
To make the 3-axis contraption, I first formed the Polymorph into rods. I then linked these rods together to form the structure.
As I mentioned I use a heat gun to get the Polymorph hot. I usually keep a section of the Polymorph cool to use as a handle. I often keep a damp paper towel nearby to cool my fingers. I use upside down canned air to cool areas of Polymorph I don't want to melt. The stuff is great fun to use.
I have a bunch of different colors of the stuff now.
The "thermochromatic pigment" turns white when touched with warm hands (or other warm objects). It's a lot of fun.
The stuff in the bottom center is glow-in-the-dark Polymorph.
I was trying to make it glow with a violet laser.
This stuff is a lot of fun to use.
Armed with a drawer full of styrene strips, sheets and scraps and various X-acto knives, I can build most anything, Old school rapid prototyping.
Anybody who hasn't built a part from nothing but thin superglue and baking soda isn't anybody. Cowboy up!
It certainly would be wonderful if Parallax has a Material Science forum.
That's exactly it. I actually bought a batch for a specific repair purpose in mind, but I went on mission and didn't get around to use it. Money out the window and more stuff to dispose of. A product like that is exactly what you need shelf life for, it's something that you will want to have at hand when you suddenly need it. And it just can't be used that way. Now if I could buy absolutely fresh batches in the nearby supermarket.. then maybe. But I can't. Mail order. You need to have a project ready for it in advance, and as I see this as a hack to do a quick repair it doesn't add up if you can't keep it around for that. I don't start build projects planning to use Sugru as an integral part of it. It's a hack for fixing things, not for building IMO (and back when I read their web page that's also how it was described - a hack for repairs).
-Tor
[edit: typo]
I did a lot of research about glue as I am building a Foamy 3D RC airplane and just about every glue maker in the world seems to tout yet another product to foamy airplane builders.
I just keep on-hand hot glue, epoxy, and super glue.
++++++
This Sugru stuff doesn't really put a bee in my bonnet.
And I am very serious about have a Material Science forum. Times are changing.
I recently received a few packets of Sugru.
They were donated to my by my brother who purchased a number of packets.
It appears to me that shelf life is not very good.
I'm attempting to find a use, but my current rubber solution has been working for
me.
I've been using 100% silicone caulk in the tube.
I use either:
5 parts 100% silicone caulk to 1 part Plaster-o-Paris
or
2 oz 100% silicone caulk to 4 drops of glycerine.
Those mixes cure up solid and completely within about 4hrs.
While the rubber durometer is a bit soft, it works for me.
As others have confirmed in this thread, the shelf life of Sugru is very much not
long enough.
For my projects and building schedule, I need shelf life of about 5 years as opposed to 5 months.
Just my 2 cents worth.
Garyg
Maker Pro Q&A: Stuck on Sugru