Sugru Review For LEGO Customization
Sugru is a strange sort of self-hardening glue/clay that comes in a variety of colors and plays very, very well with LEGO bricks. It's made for all sorts of different situations, like fitting around my MacBook power cord to add some protection to the places where it normally feels the most wear and tear. When we were provided a few packs of Sugru to review for SlashGear, we didn't just want to stay within the bounds of the given example uses of the product. We wanted to use the unique qualities of Sugru to step our LEGO game up to the next level.
The people responsible for making sure Sugru is promoted in as awesome and diverse an amount of ways as possible have shown it being used with LEGO bricks before. They've stuck a minifigure to a desk to hold cables. They've connected LEGO bricks to non-LEGO components. They've used it in a few basic sorts of ways.
What we wanted to do was to make the LEGO bricks we didnt have, but needed. This meant the material, Sugru, would have to meet or surpass our experience thus far with basic clay.
When we used stuff like Sculpy in the past, we'd had trouble with setting. Putting super tiny sculpts in the oven often resulted in overcooked, extra-brittle pieces of material in the end, material that then wasn't very receptive to additional customization.
Why is Sugru the best for making custom LEGO pieces?
1. It sculpts well.
2. It hardens overnight without an oven. Without heat. Just oxygen.
3. Once Sugru hardens, it's soft enough to cut away and continue to customize with an X-Acto Knife.
Sugru's hardened form is both strong and bendy. It's rubbery. It's as if it was made to survive being tossed into a box of LEGO bricks.
When normal clay hardens, it becomes brittle. When Sugru hardens, it becomes a consistency that's EXTREMELY similar to the rubbery LEGO minifigure parts you might be familiar with if you've purchased any extra-strange LEGO sets in the past several years.
The fellow you'll see to the right of this paragraph is our LEGO interpretation of the Star Wars character Crimson Corsair. While this character might end up being an official LEGO minifigure in the future, for now there's no set with which it's been delivered. We wanted a Crimson Corsair IMMEDIATELY. So we made a Crimson Corsair.
Because of the consistency of the Sugru once it hardens, it's extremely receptive to basic acrylic paint. It's fantastic.
The only thing we'd change about Sugru is the price – while it's entirely reasonably priced right now, I think we'd be better off if we were able to buy a lifetime supply. That'd be ideal.
You can buy a 3-pack of Sugru from places like Target – or on Sugru's online web store for a cool $12 USD. We'll be having to restrain ourselves from spending our whole paycheck.