How Sugru helped a top aerobatic pilot

 How Sugru helped Lauren, a top aerobatic pilot, get vibration-free footage at 200mph!

Wow! It's not every day that Sugru Mouldable Glue gets put through its paces at 200mph! But that's exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago when Lauren Richardson got in touch. At 26, she is one of the youngest aerobatic pilots in Britain and was voted best female aerobatic pilot for the 2012 season!

She is sponsored by awesome camera company GoPro. They supply her with cameras that she mounts on different parts of her plane. The video footage helps her evaluate her flying, so good footage is essential.

Lauren is an engineer by trade, so like most Sugru-ers, she says: “Improvising with whatever comes to hand is one of my core skills.” But there was one thing she couldn't fix...

"As a competitive flyer, I routinely find myself pulling +8g and pushing -4g in rapid succession. As you can imagine, it's quite a harsh environment. So, anything on the aeroplane has to be very securely attached and designed to fit. But one of the cameras I fitted to the plane is on the strut between the two wings (on the outside of the aircraft) and continues to cause problems for me. I tried five mounting options before Sugru and was still suffering with vibration issues at particular airflow altitudes."

Lauren got her hands on some Sugru, hoping that it might be magic fix number six! We waited, hoping it would stand up to the test...

Two weeks later, we received this incredible video. The Sugru had worked!!

"This is the first time I've achieved vibration-free footage – and believe me, this is a big deal – the Sugru mod works a treat!!"

Here you can see how Lauren has created a clever little Sugru fin to the back of the GoPro camera case that absorbs the vibrations. Sugru has excellent dampening properties, which keeps the camera perfectly steady while Lauren is doing amazing stunts at crazy speeds. (You can see the shaking in this video) 

Check out Lauren's website and catch some of her incredible aerobatic displays on Youtube.

For the more technically minded, you might find these charts pretty interesting – they show Sugru's dampening properties, which makes Lauren's clever solution possible.

- David