CLUG
The weather’s getting warmer, which means the number of bikes cluttering up the downstairs office increases ten fold, if only we had something to make storing the bikes easier and more aesthetically pleasingly.
Introducing CLUG, a clip that turns any flat surface into a nifty bicycle storage unit. Simply drill a hole into or stick the conspicuous little clip to a wall (or perhaps a tree) and clip your bike’s tyres in and hey presto, you’ve got a place for your bike to stand.
CLUG was developed for the same reason as mentioned in paragraph one of this article, tidying up the office of Hurdler Studios – a creative agency in Vancouver. The team at Hurdler all cycle to work and had considered implementing a winch system to tidy up those bikes. Seeing as they’re industrial designers and had a 3D printer on their desks they decided to try something a little different.
After holding the bike in the position in which they would like it to be it became apparent that it would only take a small clip to hold the bikes in place. Thus, armed with their MakerBot Replicator 2 they started prototyping, after several iterations they came up with the two-part ‘Clipper’ and ‘Gripper’ system.
Though the goal of their Kickstarter campaign is to raise enough money ($32,000CAD) to start an injection moulding run – in order to drive the price down, 3D printing played a huge part in the process and they are so satisfied with the printed version that they offered them to the first 200 backers.
It is becoming increasingly popular for Kickstarter projects to offer the prototype 3D printable files now as a reward, we saw this with both the Goose and Rubber Band Blaster projects recently, and Hurdler are also taking that path. For just $5 you can back the project and in return you’ll receive the CLUG stl files to make as many times as you need.
CLUG project is nearly entirely funded and their stretch goals are aimed at increasing the amount of options for bike tyres.
