Shelter, Sugru

Two rubbery things for your bike

Shelter

A year ago Mark Purdy asked me if I wanted to try a cool new chainstay protector, handing me a 12”x1” strip of thick clear tape. He assured me that it could handle compound curves without wrinkling (bike’s gotta look good), so I cut out a suitable shape and slapped it on. One year later it’s as good as new, as clear and invisible as the day I applied it. Better yet, the paint job beneath is free of dings and scratches.

It wasn’t until I asked Purdy about the tape this week that I realized that it’s so much more than thick rubbery tape. It’s called Shelter, and it’s made of 50 layers of energy absorbing netting which dissipates instead of transferring impacts. You can visit their site and see it protect a fluorescent bulb from hammer strikes. Of course it’ll keep your chainstay free of scratches during wheel changes, but it really excels at protecting CX and MTB frames from rock strikes and chain slap.

At $30 for 2 55mm x 500mm strips it’s a bit pricey, but for that size you can cover a few bikes or share with friends.

Sugru

Sugru is an air curing rubber that’s the consistency of Play-doh when it comes out of the pack. Simply mold it to whatever shape you want and it’ll cure overnight and become firm but flexible. It adheres to just about anything and is surprisingly durable. One $18 (color) or $20 (B&W) pouch comes with 12 5 gram mini packs.

I got Sugru expressly to ‘hack’ (they really like that word) a pair of sunglasses – the nosepiece wasn’t deep enough so the lenses rubbed on my cheeks (apparently that’s a thing). Most of the 5g pack was still left after building up the nosepiece, so I added two little nubs to the earpieces to keep the shades in place when they’re up in the helmet vents.

There was still some left so I fixed a pair of Apple earbuds.

And there was still some left so I made some grippers for a water bottle cage.

It’s been a few weeks now and all the pieces are intact. I’m especially impressed that the bits on the bottle cage have held. The cage wasn’t particularly clean when I applied them, and bottles are constantly rubbing against them. Other possible cycling related applications? Patch shoes scuffed up in crashes, silence loose and rattling computer mounts, sculpt a tiny version of your spirit animal and attach it to your stem.