💾 Archived View for eoinrul.es › projects › PrintedIce captured on 2022-04-28 at 17:52:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Feels strange to do a project that wasn't a direct ancestor of the MIDI Beer. We were out for cocktails and the Old Fashioned was served with a single huge ice cube that had the bar's name written in the ice. We've got to get one of those, and we can do it better.
I want ice cubes with a pattern which will catch some of the cocktail and make the pattern more visible. Lets fire up OpenSCAD and make a positive version of the ice cube. OpenSCAD is great for any design where I need to do math, but I really wish it could do some additional things like assigning geometry to variables or exporting intermediate transforms from a module.
Designing the cube in OpenSCAD.
Pulled a cardboard box out of the recycling to make a mold casing.
The cheapest food-safe silicone on Amazon
I didn't try particularly hard to degass the silicone before pouring and didn't use any mold release on the printed PLA or cardboard. The 3D-printed cube had so little infill that I decided it was unlikely to come out in one piece anyway. Glued the whole thing together, poured the rubber and waited.
Due to a combination of the printer resolution and tearing from use, lots of the detail from the inside has been lost. Making the walls of the lines sloped, rather than vertical might help a lot here. However, in practice, pouring room-temperature drink unto the ice tends to melt the whole pattern away. Chilling ahead of time helps, but then you can't rely on the ice to melt as fast to give you dilution. This pattern is probably pushing the limits of complexity.
Next version, I think I'll inset the lines into the ice cube and see if that retains the pattern for much longer.
