Live Somewhere Cold and Own a Gadget? You Gotta Read This
We're so used to giving gadgets beatings in our abusive lab tests that we've often wondered just how much extra tinkering it would take to elevate a garden-variety nonruggedized product into a masochistic gizmo that could take a considerable licking and come back for more. When we raised the question with the MythBusters, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, it got our guest editors' gears spinning with ideas, and they delivered a laundry list of materials that we could tape, glue or otherwise wrap around our electronics to toughen them up.
So, equipped with little more than the collective educated guesses of Jamie, Adam and our staff as to what might work, we bought three devices—a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop ($400); a Nokia 5310 phone ($50 with T-Mobile contract); and a Nikon Coolpix S220 ($150)—then made several trips to Home Depot, Staples and Sports Authority to pick up supplies.
PHONE
Our theory was that the easiest piece of equipment to ruggedize would be our Nokia cellphone. Most mobile phones are built to withstand everyday drops and splashes. But we wanted a phone that could survive an angry throw across a room in response to a dropped call, and repeated dunks in water. Our first trick was to surround the edges of our candy-bar style cellphone with multiple large rubber bands to create a "bumper" so thick it bounced when we dropped it. Sure enough, when we tossed it into the wall, it bounced to the floor, but never broke or turned off.
For our first attempt at waterproofing, we wrapped the phone with a clear heat-shrink film designed for draft-sealing household windows, then went over it gently with a heat gun to mold it to the phone. We must have missed a spot, because when we dunked our Nokia, water leaked in and we were forced to perform an emergency shrink-wrap-ectomy to keep the water from shorting out the phone.
CAMERA
Phones are largely solid-state products, with few moving parts to bump around, but cameras are a different story. With multiple lens elements and mechanical zoom components, even pocket-size digital cameras can be fragile instruments. There are plenty of affordable, ruggedized, water-resistant cameras on the market, so we figured there had to be a way to build in this level of performance ourselves.
Waterproofing turned out to be the easy part. As watersports enthusiasts already know, zip-lock plastic bags provide a formidable moisture barrier, so just sealing our camera in a plastic bag made it dunkable.
Ruggedizing our Nikon turned out to be a far harder proposition. We made things difficult for ourselves by picking a camera with a telescoping lens, which needed special protection. We surrounded the lens with a section of small-diameter PVC tubing and glued a $5 ultraviolet lens filter to the front of our barrel to allow for clearer shots than we were getting through our plastic bag. To protect the corners and edges, we used foam tape and weatherstripping, making sure to leave the flash and controls uncovered. Then we zipped the digicam back into its plastic bag, cut a hole for the protective lens barrel, smeared silicone around the seams and let it dry.
When we dunked it in water again, we learned an important lesson: Use silicone on both sides of any seal. Water crept in through our sloppy job and almost destroyed the camera. We had to remove it from the bag and leave it out to dry. When we did a more thorough job of silicone sealing, the Nikon survived its next submersion.
Our impact test produced mixed results. We tried drops from 3 and 5 feet to simulate the fumbles of the common klutz. The padded Nikon came through all of them without damage. But when we pushed our luck and dropped our camera from 8 feet, our UV filter shattered, and the shock gave the camera an irreconcilable "lens error." We accomplished our main goal of protecting against everyday accidents, but deep down, we had hoped to create a supercamera. We didn't.
