The next photo will involve bourbon…
I also made it all “official” yesterday with a big Social, email and SMS blast. Fingers crossed!
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Wow…. That cube3 would look great in some Woodford Double Oaked. Just. Sayin’
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Awesome Dude! The site looks amazing good job!
That looks pretty cool That ice looks so perfect it seems fake! Definitely need to add pictures to the custom carving page as you get them. A Cube sitting in Bourbon seems like a great picture to add as well.
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are you doing the spheres on the cnc also? ball nose?
Very nice!
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whoa wait!!! Are you running Idex tooo???
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“The Big Guys” use their cncs to make the spheres but they also run 20" x 40" sheets when they do. It’s a flip job. The cutter requires a 1/2" collet. I pull mine out of 6 x 6 slabs I pre cut to fit the jig I’m using in a drill press. It took me about six hours and something like 50+ spheres to dial in the jig and I’m still only getting maybe a 65-70% success rate. If you’re out by .25mm on one side you double that on the flip. And when you want a clear sphere you have to be right on the money. Even a little scrap of snow on the jig is enough to throw things off. It’s actually quite a PITA.
The LR is just dual core. Not IDEX. They both do the same thing. It’s pretty sweet. Cuts my engraving time in half!
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Can you get one of those sphere melters and add a tiny heater too it? A pid controller and a couple heaters is super easy to wire up.
Something like this, Amazon.com
pid, Inkbird PID Temperature Controller Kit, High Voltage 100ACV to 240ACV, Comes with SSR 40DA Solid State Relay, K Type Thermocouple, and White Heat Sink: Amazon.com: Industrial & Scientific
Heater, drilled into the press somewhere, Amazon.com
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Awesome! what a business!
Wait,
I mean,
Cool, bahahahaha
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The sphere melters take a long time (from a production standpoint) and leave messy streaks on the spheres. I had high hopes for them so bought a few but they’re pretty bad. Again - bad from a production volume standpoint.
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Ah bummer.
how does the ice get so clear?
Would you believe me if I told you it’s the $20 pump inside the $10,000 machine? That’s pretty much it.
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Well… do i need the $10K machine or can I just use the pump?
Right? Hahaha. I guess the super-duper flux capacitor powered cold plate may have something to contribute to the clarity too.
I have a job for tomorrow that could REALLY have used this. Hate when procrastination comes back to bite ya in the ass. My goal - to have them all sanded tonight and spray the primer tomorrow.
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Did you know if you make your ice from boiled water it makes it clearer.
Not in this kind of machine. Based on what I’ve been learning boiling when making “typical” ice cubes will do well to boil off some of the, how would you say…chemical impurities? I’m referring to the Chlorine or Chloramine and Fluoride some municipalities (like ours) adds to the water. And the less of these impurities there are the clearer the cube should be. But any dissolved solids/minerals won’t boil out.
Ice (which is theoretically ‘just’ the water molecules freezing) forms from the outside inwards and so all these impurities get continually focused towards the middle of a typical ice cube until they get so high in concentration they start to come out of solution and freeze into the ice. I can’t say with certainty but do know that there’s enough calcium in our water that without me running the water through a resin softener first the calcium will come out of solution and create white wisps in the giant ice block once it’s concentration nears the 5x mark.
Ice is so fascinating.
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Not to mention Pykrete. Project Habakkuk - Wikipedia
Deaeration helps also. @macboy 's description of how ice freezes is pretty cool. Does your machine freeze on a plate a layer at a time? Like a resin printer sort of? so that the impurities stay in the water that doesn’t freeze?