How to Ruggedize Your Own Gadgets (With Video!)

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Portable electronic devices can be subjected to some serious knocks, drops and sticky situations—from tumbles off tables to toilet-bowl splashdowns. In response, an entire subsection of the personal electronics industry has evolved to produce ruggedized tech. These water-resistant, shockproof gadgets are designed to protect delicate circuitry from clumsy spills and from the unforgiving environments of messy jobs (police work, construction) and outdoor recreation. But they often cost more and skimp on features.

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.


Obviously, we needed a more reliable solution, so next we tried vacuum-sealing the phone in a plastic bag using a FoodSaver device. The kitchen gadget was a bit too enthusiastic, however—it sealed our phone inside the bag and suctioned all of the buttons down at once, making it impossible to dial. We cut it free and retried the vacuum seal on the FoodSaver’s “pulse” mode, which allowed us to modulate the vacuum action. The results were good. Our bumperized, vacuum-sealed phone took all the impacts and water torture we could subject it to. But our solution was inherently temporary—there was no way to recharge the phone without breaking the seal. Still, our fix would be more than adequate for a weekend boating trip.

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