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  2. How Much Water does a Fountain Use?
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  7. Cost to store a VHS tape in a NYC apartment?
  8. Guess Your Blood Alcohol Level Booth
  9. Find the Loudest Restaurant in Sacramento
  10. How Much do Clothes Weigh?
  11. Trying to Make Clear Ice
  12. Searching the Indian Ocean for a Plane Crash
  13. Electronic Cigarettes - The Fog Machine for Your Face
  14. Scott Leased an Electric Ford Focus
  15. Testing the Effectiveness of a Beer Cozy
  16. Eggshells vs. Taco Shells
  17. How Ice Rinks are Made
  18. Shaken vs. Stirred
  19. Real Appliance Energy Use Tests
  20. Christmas Lights Power Cost
  21. The Best Cold Drink Cup
  22. LED vs. Regular Bulbs & CFLs
  23. Coldest drink in town?
  24. Using Salt to Cool Down Beer
  25. Coors Light Cold Indicator
  26. The Fastest Way to Cool Down Beer
  27. Hairdryer vs. Bowl of Water
  28. Bathroom During a Movie?
  29. Video Projector on a Disco Ball
  30. Cool Trunk
  31. The weight of popcorn
  32. Sunchips bag decomposition
  33. Disscating a cockroach
  34. Sensefly Drone Camera
  35. Entrance Locked
  36. End Rubbernecking
  37. Eyeclops Night Vision
  38. Miracle Fruit Taste Test
  39. Hot Air Bubbles
  40. Helium Bubbles
  41. Neighborhood Speed Trap
  42. Pizza Race
  43. Eyeclops - Bionic Magnifier
  44. Breathalyzer Testing
  45. Fishing Line Fiberoptics
  46. The Value of CFL Bulbs
  47. Barry Marshall Fan Page
  48. Bottling the Keg Leftovers
  49. Spinning Rim Centrifuge
  50. Backwash Experiments
  51. sidewalk chalk
  52. Red Hot Vioxx Action!
  53. Balloon Delivery
  54. Tanning
  55. Making a Candle Out of Lipstick
  56. Evaporation
  57. The lift of a Helium Balloon
  58. Lard Candle
  59. The Properties of Heat Transfer
  60. Insulation Testing
  61. Eating Out
  62. Eating In
  63. Tattoo Removal
  64. Drying Laundry
  65. Viscosity Testing
  66. Magazine Advertising
  67. Collecting Data
  68. Dropping Toast
  69. Refilling an Ink Cartridge
  70. Tampons
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Trying to Make Clear Ice - page 6

The pumped water worked against two things I thought I understood. The frothing action on the top of the water seemed like it would throw more air into the water, not less. And the water spray on the top seemed like it would grab coldness out of the freezer and pull it into the water faster, kind of like the opposite of a convection oven.

The pump method looked promising. There was a thick layer of clear ice at the bottom of the tub, but when I tried to remove it, the remaining liquid surrounded it, and was peppered with ice bubbles when I continued the process.

I tried once again.

O the second attempt, freezing the ice took a very long time, about a day and a half. Eventually the top froze over and I knew the ice would buckle if I let it continue freezing. I pulled it out of the freezer and decided to stop the freezing and remove the remaining water.

A drill didn't crack the ice. It drilled right through like it was going into soft wood.

I drained the remaining water and liked the way the block looked. The pump was frozen into place. The top had bumps and streaks and bubbles, but it had a thick, clear layer on the bottom. This was it!

I put the drained ice back into the freezer for a few hours while I went to borrow a long hand saw.

I brought it outside to cut the good from the bad. So many of my ice block experiments had cracked, I had formed the impression that ice was fragile.

The slab on the left had no bubbles. It looked great!

The slab on the right was a bit opaque and had a water pump frozen inside.

I wiped the saw marks with a wet cloth and watched them disappear, leaving me with an almost perfectly clear block of ice. It looked awesome!

Here are a couple of shots of the ice in front of the television, in an attempt to show its clarity.

The block was about an inch thick. I was extremely happy with it. It looked like a slab of clear acrylic plastic, and I now had the recipe to make it even better:

  1. Use a water pump to churn the water surface
  2. Stop before all the liquid is solid.
  3. Cut or chip away ugly parts. The ice can handle some tooling without crumbling.

Thank God that finally worked. I can't remember the last time I had to try 20 different things to get something to work.

In retrospect, I was mislead by the first few links on the internet. When they failed to deliver the answer, I marched off on my own, wandering around, trying everything in the garage to get the results I was looking for.

Then, after a dozen failures, I went back and found the answer on the internet, I just had to test them for myself.

In conclusion, WikiHow sucks and Instructibles is unreliable, but the rest of the internet holds great promise.

 

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