at this point of the aluminum ice welding video, I’m attaching the back wing of the angel ice sculpture I’m working on.
updated 8/31/23
aluminum ice welding video
This video simply shows how I added multiple pieces of ice to an angel sculpture that I was making. The angel won’t fit in the dimensions of the ice block, so I have to add pieces of ice to make the full angel. I used a technique that I’m calling aluminum ice welding (I call it other things on other parts of the site 
) to weld additional parts onto the angel.
When you’re doing aluminum ice welding, you’re taking a warm piece of aluminum plate to “perfect” the flatness of two pieces of ice that you’ve already cut as flat as you can. One or both pieces of ice should be a bit below freezing. Once the weld surfaces are perfected with the flat aluminum plate, you quickly put the weld surfaces together and add some cold water. If you did it correctly, you should quickly see the weld start to freeze outward from the center.
Naming this procedure, aluminum ice welding, has been problematic for a long time in ice sculpting. If you just call it aluminum welding, it gets confused with welding actual aluminum. (Or, if you’re in Great Britain, aluminium.) There are a lot of other ways to say it, but they’re often pretty clunky.
A couple extra notes on this video: When you watch the video at a lower quality setting, the captions may be hard to read. Click the settings gear icon at the bottom of the video to increase the quality. Also, anyone who’s used a propane torch 🔥 on an ice sculpture knows that it’s not supposed to work like it’s shown in the video, but it looked cool, so I used the footage.
links and stuff
I have more videos on the appropriately named ice sculpture video page. Also, there’s lots more about welding ice with aluminum in this extensive post.
