How to a make Crystal Clear Ice Sphere - DIY Project

look at this thing it's beautiful this is a crystal-clear eye sphere and in this video I'm gonna show you how to make one using simple household items and pretty basic techniques thanks for looking in today's episode let's get started it's ice-t by the way [Music] okay so let's talk about how we're gonna make these awesome clear eye spheres using this insulated mug some Christmas ornaments some play-doh and some silicone it sounds like a super strange combination of things I know but it's actually super easy to make so to start off with let's quickly talk about what makes ice freeze clear so you see when ice freezes it pushes old impurities and small air bubbles sets inside the water out away from where it freezes from that's why in a normal ice cube the center is cloudy because it froze evenly from all sides so all the air bubbles and impurities got pushed in towards the center so it's actually pretty easy to make clear ice if you were to take this insulated cup fill up water and put it in a freezer since it's insulated from all the sides it would freeze from top to bottom that would mean that about half of it would come out crystal clear because all sides but the top are insulated so in order to get a clear ice sphere instead of just a cup shaped block of ice we need to make a mold and we're gonna make that mold inside of this cup so that when the water freezes inside of this mold it freezes from top to bottom pushing all the impurities all the way down to the bottom and in order to not get a sphere with all the impurities at the bottom of it we're gonna leave some extra room in the bottom of the cup that will fill with water so that when the sphere freezes it will freeze all the way through and then push the impurities down into the water below it if that sounds complicated trust me it really isn't it's actually super easy to make and I'll leave a link to all the things that you'll need down in the description below so let's get started making this so since we're gonna use silicone to make this mold we need something to make a mold of and for that I picked up these super inexpensive Christmas ornaments they're like two halves that just simply snap together I think you're meant to fill these with stuff and then hang them on your tree these come in all sorts of different sizes so you can really make any size you want you could also make different shapes the process would be exactly the same so we'll start with the bottom of the cup and then work our way up so you remember I said in the beginning that we need to have water in the bottom here so that when the ice freezes it can push the impurities into that water now to do that we'll fill the bottom half of this cup with something that keeps the silicone from getting down there in my case I'm just gonna use playthough but you can literally use anything as long as it's easily moldable and so that I can use a little bit less play-doh I'm just gonna use this small plastic cup put it inside there and that will block off some of the space it smells like childhood so we'll fill this cup of play-doh up to just about where the thick part begins okay so now that the bottom half of this cup is full of play-doh on to the next step which is our Christmas ornament now these things come in two halves and they have this little tab at the top here that we need to get rid of so we'll start by using a bit of CA glue to glue the two halves together and then we'll use a file to file off the old tab and we're filing it off don't worry it doesn't need to be super fruity since this is gonna turn into ice and ice is pretty forgiving okay we've got our sphere it's glued together the tab is filed off as I said doesn't need to be super pretty now we need some way of suspending this thing inside of the middle of the cup I'm gonna drill a couple of holes in it and then stick this rod through it now I'm gonna use an 8 millimeter aluminum rod because I had aluminum you really don't need to use an aluminum rod you can use a wooden dowel or literally anything but the rod needs to be around 8 millimeters or so because it's gonna serve as the channel that will allow the water to freeze all the way from the sphere into the water in the bottom so the holes are drilled I stuck the rod through and I good it in place and luckily as you can see it doesn't need to be super pretty the next step is to stick this thing into the play-doh in the bottom here so that the sphere ends up roughly in the middle of this thick section at the top next step is to take a piece of fairly wide masking tape or any other tape really tape around the top of the cup creating an edge on the top here of a couple of centimeters and we're doing this so that the silicone will end up a little bit above the cup and that will give us a nice lift to grab on to and pull it out of the cup now to let show you the last bit and then we're done with the mold and that is just making sure that this thing isn't super wobbly and do that we're just going to take two of these stirring sticks and tape them onto this side of the cup and now we'll just use a little bit more tape and tape the rod securely in place and you know what that's it that's literally the only need to do this is the mold finished just have to mix up some silicone and then pour it in here let's talk about silicone for just a second now there's a ton of different types of silicone out there they vary in how hard or soft again and they vary in how long they take to setup now the silicone that I'll be using I bought here locally but I'll leave a link in the description below the one that is very similar to this one now for reference this silicone is about a 22 short that means that it's pretty soft and squishy it's also a one-to-one silicone meaning that you mix equal parts of a and B but make sure that you follow the instructions for silicone that you'll be using this silicone has a pot life of about an hour that means that I need to finish up mixing and pouring it into the mold within that our different silicones will have different pot lives I've also tried to cast it in the silicone that has 10 minutes that also works but you need to work a lot quicker now the benefit with that is that you can take it out of the mold within an hour with this stuff which has a much longer pot life the hardening time will also be much longer so I'll leave this stuff overnight okay so let's make some silicone I know for my first test that the entire mold will take about 750 grams so we need half of that of each part so let's weigh that out so about a cup here and we'll measure out the same amount for each part that'll be 375 grams for each and that is one okay on to Part B and conveniently there are two different colors so it's really easy to see when they're fully mixed together fun fact only one part of silicone will never harden and it will be sticky on your worktable forever so we'll take our a and B a clean empty cup and now we'll pour both of these together in there and then mix them up properly okay so here's the thing for you once you think you mix it up really really well and you're sure that everything is mixed together properly take another cup and then pour all of this stuff into that new cup scrape around all the edges and make sure you get everything in there and that way you're sure that there's nothing unmixed left in the cup now give this an hour mixing and you're absolutely sure that everything is mixed together properly and now before we pour it into the mold I like to break it a little bit against the table trying to get some of those air bubbles to come up to the surface and burst okay that's it we're ready to pour the silicone into our mold and a little trick here is to pour from pretty high up so the air bubbles pop on their way down and also to pour against one side so that the mold fills up evenly it looks like a measurement was dead-on right our cup is empty that thing is full and all that's left to do now is let this thing sit overnight and then we'll take it out of the mold tomorrow morning okay welcome back it's not actually today after it's two days later because yesterday when I came back the tape on the top of this thing had come off and the ball inside I'd float it to the top overnight and house basically left with something looking like this where the bowl that just floated to the top and now I just have this big piece of silicone that I can't use for anything so I fixed that bit all over again taped it down properly this thing is now proper hard so we're gonna de Mol this and see how it looks inside and since this is silicon and silicon basically it doesn't stick to anything it will also come right off that tape all right now it should be just a matter of trying to work it out and have this thing come out of here like that and playbill should come right off the bottom here just scrape off however much you can get off with your fingers so I've washed off the remaining play-doh under the sink with some hot water now to the last bit and that is trying to get that ball out of there you see now the entire thing is just covered in silicone so they get it out we're just quite simply we use a knife and cut it out now we want to be a little bit smart about how we cut it apart now we want to cut it just enough to get the ball out of there and also then the eye sphere out of there and we want to cut it in such a way that it makes you easy to align it back up so instead of doing one continuous straight cut all the way along the side of this thing I'm gonna cut it in a six lag pattern which will make it easier for the two halves to align back together once we put it back in the cup [Music] so this is it the mold is actually finished this is what it looks like on the inside it's nice and shiny and it's caught you the ball really well so water's gonna go in there fill up the ball run out through the bottom and then fill the cup and just to show you why we did this zig-zag pattern when we cut it apart now we see because of the six side pattern the two halves actually line up fairly easily compared to this mold here which I just cut straight to show you it's much harder to get it to line up properly when there's just a straight cut and don't worry those zigzag lines won't be visible on the ice fear okay it's time to put this thing to the test suitably I've been doing this that works really well is that I'll just fill this cup with water first and then I'll just take the silicone mold press it in there and just let it overflow and then hopefully at the end there should be water squishing out at the top here if you spilled any just top it off at the top here until it's completely full and then this whole thing just goes in the freezer now you'll hear a lot of different theories about what kind of water to use where you need to boil it first what do you need to use distilled water I found that for me I can just use regular tap water I don't need to do anything to it but if you live in an area that for instance has a lot of minerals in the water it might be good to maybe use distilled water or try pulling it first so I'm gonna go put this thing in the freezer and leave it there for at least 24 hours it needs to be in there this long because it's insulated from all sides and it's gonna take a really long time to freeze from the top all the way to the bottom okay are you ready I don't have a freezer here in the workshop so I had to freeze this thing at home put it in this cooler and I hope that didn't melt on its way over here all right let's have a look at this work [Applause] okay so it definitely seems like it's frozen all the way through because the top here is popped up a little bit and that tells me that the ice on the bottom is frozen and pushed it up so let's try to get this thing out of here okay so it's definitely frozen all the way through you can see that ice in the bottom here this thing has been the freezer for a little over two days not to the moment of the truth let's see if this worked look at it it's beautiful oh wow it's perfect and really please do this [Music] man look at this it's so cool how when the ice cube is completely clear it basically disappears underneath the liquid here you can't see it it's crazy and I have to tell you this might not have been the first time I tried this this is actually the third because the first two times clumsy me managed to drop that ice ball and crack it and when it's completely clear it's super visible no surprise it's fine it's fine it's fine so yeah this is literally a week later than when I said originally I was going to show you this also two things that I discovered during this process of freezing this one was that on the bottom here the distance from the bottom of the sphere on the inside to the bottom here was like this much and that was way too much for ice to manage to push all the impurities out suck up this relief at the bottom here and that worked great also I didn't pay quite enough attention to where I placed the ball inside of the cup when I made the mold so the sphere shape inside here actually sits a little bit above this lip that sits against this edge which causes the water to leak out at the very top now to solve this I just used a little bit of tape but if I was to do this again I would just place the sphere a little bit lower inside of the cup when I made the mold but other than that I am super happy with the way this is turn out I hope you enjoyed watching this video maybe you want to try for yourself I'll leave the link to all the products I used in the description below make sure to give this video a thumbs up if you liked it it actually makes a huge difference if you do please subscribe if you're not yet and make sure to click that belt so you get notified every time I upload something new as for now thanks so much for watching and I see you guys in the next video Cheers mmm it's iced tea by the way

Channel: Alexandre Chappel

Views: 344,971

Keywords: ice, clear ice, freezing clear ice, how to make clear ice, making crystal clear ice, howto, how to make clear ice at home, easy clear ice, diy clear ice, diy, diy project, easy diy project, easy mold making, silicone mold making, projects for home, easy mold making project, casting silicone mold, how to make silicone mold

Id: 9cb5kk9s4wY

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 02 2020