Product review: Sugru part 2

Most of the photos on this site are taken with a Sigma DP1 camera. This camera has its quirks, and despite its form-factor is certainly not your typical user-friendly point-and-shoot. It has a very large, unusual sensor and a very sharp lens which make for fine image quality at the expense of speed and ease-of-use.

One of the accessories sold for this camera is an external optical virefinder, an overpriced little plastic thing. I made my own from a flea market camera with the same field of view, a dead flash, hobby store brass, leather, and Sugru.



By this time I had learned a little bit about the material, and feel that this was a better success than my sauce pan repair. By letting the Sugru cure just a few minutes after opening the package it becomes much easier to mold. Most shapes are best created from a base sausage-type form, which can then be formed as it hardens over the next ten or fifteen minutes. Sugru also acts as an excellent putty for filling cracks and imperfections. The grip I added to the camera was smoothed and shaped with a stainless steel ruler, and looks like a commercial product. The viewfinder is more clumsy, but with the Sugru is now well-protected.

The material hardened quickly and the camera and viewfinder are now ready for use.

Pear clafoutis

I had a pile of pears that were ripe, so I figured I'd better do something with them. A classic quick treat for a coffee or desert here is a clafoutis made with whatever fruit is in season, so today: pear clafoutis.

Above: a buttered skillet, with ten smallish pear halves fanned out. Peel the pears, and use the end of the peeler to remove the core once halved.

In the blender I've got 1 1/4 C of dairy: in this case half buttermilk and half whole milk. Crack in three eggs, then add 1/3 C of sugar and 1/3 C of flour, and a bit of vanilla. Blend!

Pour the mixture over the pears, and bake 30 min at 200 deg C (400 deg F).

Cyclocross in Slottskogen

Product review: Sugru part 1

Somehow I stumbled upon Sugru a couple of months ago whilst perusing the interwebs. The stuff seemed to have potential, so I ordered a small starter pack. I was surprised upon receiving the parcel how little one gets for one's money: the kit I got contained six small packets, each containing less in volume than those little ketchup packs from Dairy Queen. They also have expiration dates, which is somewhat intimidating: better think of something to do with my remaining five, at least before April next year.

Fortunately, I had a project waiting. This is a really nice 2L saucepan I picked up at a flea market here in town. Thick, robust stainless, possibly a sandwich bottom (one fellow I showed it to suggested it may have a layer of copper in the bottom), and a cracking bakelite plastic handle:

Normally I avoid any type of plastic handle on my pots and pans, since I like to be able to pop them from stove top to oven and back again at will. Since Sugru claims to be heat resistant to 180 deg C, I figured it was worth giving it a go to repair the handle.

My first impression of the material upon opening the package was that it was really too sticky and fluid to work with. It most certainly wouldn't support itself for any type of larger piece, at least in the state is is upon opening. I also realized that the volume of the little packet, while seemingly tiny, was really too much for my project.

I tried two different methods for this repair. First, I rubbed a small volume of Sugru in some of the smaller cracks near the handle, putty-like. Then I took a much larger volume and coated the handle around the larger cracks near the hole in the handle.

The Sugru was much harder to form and smooth than I had been expecting. It really is a fairly fluid consistency straight out of the packet. The final result is therefore kind of choppy, and not at all as professional-looking as I had hoped. But the cracks are indeed filled, and the handle has taken machine washings without any trouble so far. The Sugru-as-putty experiment was perhaps more successful, and I may attempt to re-do the handle entirely with this method in the future.

It's not a pizza until it comes out of the oven!

We made pumpkin pizza last night, with a nice pumpkin-base sauce and smoked wild boar. My daughter wanted to add cucumbers, so I let her put one on a corner, and showed her one of my favorite Seinfeld clips:

Zombie Bicycle Thief

$6 for a tube and $10 for labor?

Smith Tower Penthouse

Apparently Buckminster Fuller's former baby-sittee lives atop the Smith Tower in Seattle.