How to Make Large Blocks of Clear Ice for Sculpting and Drink Making
Introduction: How to Make Large Blocks of Clear Ice for Sculpting and Drink Making
This project shows you how to make clear ice blocks of almost any size. The largest was 25cm X 35cm X 25cm, limited only really by the size of my freezer. I also will show the ice saw I used to shape pieces after they were made, and techniques for cutting.
This ice can be used as the starter for sculptures, as clear windows for an igloo, treasure hunt in an ice wall, and cut into pieces of any size for clear ice in drinks and cocktails.
The principle of this design is directional freezing and keeping the liquid water constantly in motion.
Supplies
You will need the following(as a minimum):
A freezer large enough to take the complete setup.
Water pumps : These are ebay $7 240L/Hour pumps, but anything that circulates the water will work. (Ebay name is DC12V 3m 240L/H Ultra Quiet Brushless Motor Submersible)
A container to hold the water. The rectangular container I use is the best because the polystyrene insulation can slide to any position on the straight edges.
Polystyrene for insulation : I used some flat-ish discard from packaging and hot glued it together into a box shape.
Optional (but strongly recommended components):
LED lighting strip : Mount this to the top of the water container at the transition from water to air.
Variable power supply : Although some of the ebay pumps come with a USB cable to run them, I use 12V pumps and a DC/DC converter with variable voltage out to adjust the speed and LED brightness.
Nichrome wire : For making an ice cutting tool.
Brackets : provide a rigid barrier to the container expanding and provide a mount location if you are freezing objects into the ice.
Step 1: Making the Ice Container
Pictured is my smaller ice maker with a <PERSON> toy suspended in the middle of it.
Pictured in supplies section is the two water pumps I used, glued to some plastic that fits over the edge of the container wall. You'll want to minimum amount of material inside the container as possible, as it gets frozen into the block and has to be melted out.
These pumps hang on opposite ends and have the intake/outlet aligned so it makes a whirlpool like effect. If you only have 1 pump, it still generally works, but the quiet corner always freezes over. With two, no part freezes on the top.
The LED lighting is simple (cheap) strips of LEDs. These strips use resistors to regulate the LED brightness from a 12V supply, so they get warm all over(which is what we want). Wrap it around the at the junction where the water level normally tops out. By keeping this transition warm, no ice will form on the surface. 401
Without it, the pumps tend to swirl the water above the resting height of the water, and it starts to freeze on the wall. The more that splashes on, the more that freezes, and it ends up blocking water flow.
Also in supplies is the polystyrene box, and how it fits over the water container. For the rectangular container, the box can slide up and down to any level. Its a tight enough fit that it stays wherever it is put, so it can be moved all the way to the bottom, or just rest on the top few cm. This was assembled by cutting the box (the ice cutter(below) doubles as a great polystyrene cutter) and hot gluing it together(dont get it too hot - it melts easily).
For the power supply for the water pumps and the LED lights, I used an old AC/DC transformer(that put out around 16V or so) and an adjustable step down circuit(pictured). Although you can just run your pumps and lights at constant voltage, I found that full power was putting out too much heat and slowing down the freezing process too much. By adjusting it down to about 10.5 volts, it was still doing the required job, but not adding too much extra heat.
The brackets to hold the sides in were just some L-Brackets held together with glue and wood sticks. They were important to stop the sides bulging out and restricting the movement of the insulating box.
Step 2: Larger Ice Container
Pictured here is the larger ice container I made. I dont like it as much, for these reasons.
The shape is tapered(so it could stack into itself if there were multiple empty ones). This means that an insulating box cant easily be made to fit the outside. The best I could do was insulate the lid(which was 'just' enough)
Its very heavy to lift. The potential for massive spills of water is high. 98