things would have been ugly without using aluminum welding on this elaborate Mardi Gras jester sculpture at the old Fairmont hotel in New Orleans! (It’s made from can ice with a pretty visible core.)
updated 10/23/23: I can’t believe I forgot to include my own video on the welding ice with aluminum! Also updated 8/4/23 with seo and some minor tweaks.
welding ice with aluminum was a major innovation
Maybe the first time I saw this technique was at a National Championships in Scranton, PA. I’m not positive, but I think it was 1995. Mike Palombo had a Native American chief sculpture that had it’s arms stretched out to either side and this technique was used to weld the arms on. It was remarkable how clean and strong the welds looked and it was a big deal because I remember a lot of carvers talking about how he did it.
It was cold and he had a small portable oven with lit sternos inside. The oven was heating small, flat pieces of marble and he would use the marble to flatten both welding surfaces and then put the pieces together. Add a little bit of cold water and the weld would quickly freeze, as long as the ice was cold enough (but not too cold, or it would fracture). This welding method formed ice welds stronger than any other technique yet known of and the welds were hard to see too.
I’m not totally sure who really came up with the idea, but Mike Palombo and Erik Cantine get the credit in my memory. Other skilled carvers quickly adopted the technique and I remember seeing it used in competitions. At some point, aluminum plate was used instead (see the addendum at the bottom), and it became the favored material over polished marble and/or granite (which will crack after a while and get pretty heavy!). Hopefully, someone who knows the exact story will add it to the comments section at the bottom. That’s why it’s there after all!
Anyway, when I moved to New Orleans, Clinebell ice was hard to come by and if I wanted clear ice sculptures, then I had to cut the core out of my blocks and weld them back together. This was my Aluminum (actually, I used marble a lot) Welding Boot Camp. Now, it’s just part of my carving procedure and I don’t have to worry about whether or not I can weld something, just if I should or not.
I probably do some sort of welding on eighty percent of the sculptures that I do and I almost always use this technique. The jester pictured above was a particularly involved welding exercise (it was from about 1999?) The piece isn’t totally clear, but it’s pretty darn close (the back leg was a problem.)
The gist of the technique is that you cut your two weld surfaces as flat as possible with a chainsaw, nailboard, or perhaps planer, and then you use the slightly warmed aluminum plate to flatten the surfaces. Once the surfaces are perfectly flat, you quickly put the pieces together. Then you pour cold water over the ice so that it flows into the weld. As long as your ice is cold enough and the weld is flat enough, then you should have a strong weld almost instantly.
basic steps of welding ice with aluminum plate
- Plan your weld(s).
- Ready your aluminum, cold water, and ice.
- Cut your weld surfaces as flat as possible.
- Apply warm aluminum plate to both surfaces until the plate grabs when it’s removed.
- Join weld surfaces immediately, positioning carefully.
Add cold water to the weld while supporting the added ice if necessary.
additional welding ice with aluminum tips
Over the years, several carvers have offered advice to me on the technique:
Aaron Costic showed me how to make an aluminum sandwich: put the aluminum plate between the two weld surfaces and hold it together until the surfaces are flat. Then quickly slide the plate out and press the ice surfaces together; then apply cold water. This method gives the weld surfaces no time to change and is very quick. It helps if you have 2 people.
Dean Carlson pointed out that thicker (3/4” rather than 1/2”) aluminum is better. It holds heat better and you don’t need to get it very hot (just slightly warm.) In another recent conversation with Dean, he explained that you shouldn’t apply the metal to the ice for very long, or you end up with a curved welding surface (not what you’re looking for).
As the metal sits in contact with the ice, the edges of your weld surface melt slightly faster than the center of the weld surface. So if the metal stays against the ice too long, then you get a convex (high in the center) surface. To avoid this, your surfaces should be as flat as you can make them BEFORE you apply the aluminum so that you don’t have to have the metal against the ice for very long. And a “tempered” (heat evenly distributed, no hot spots) piece of aluminum works best.
Erik Cantine showed me the pebbling pattern that starts in the center of the weld and indicates a strong weld. If you look closely, you can sometimes see the weld slowly freezing, expanding out from the center of the weld to the edges.
I can’t remember who I saw using a cooking syringe to shoot COLD water into the weld, but I remember seeing Kevin Roscoe or Peter Slavin using a modified needle pump (like to pump up a basketball) as a very large syringe. Later, Junichi Nakamura took this to a whole new level for me with giant syringes. Maybe they were for whales, or maybe they were modified pumps too…
Aaron Costic demonstrated a number of times in competition that you can weld ice in warm temperatures if you just get one of the two pieces of ice down to below freezing. You can put it in a freezer for a while, or cool it down with dry ice. You have to be careful not to fracture the cold piece of ice though.
Somebody else who I can’t remember pointed out that the aluminum will grab onto a very flat surface. If you have a good weld surface, you can tell because the aluminum will pull on the ice as you pull it away.
I’ve included a few diagrams that should be helpful below.
this is the aluminum sandwich trick for welding ice with aluminum. It maximizes the strength of the weld by getting the weld surfaces together as soon as possible after the aluminum is removed.
in this case, welding ice with aluminum isn’t going to work. The piece of aluminum is too big and/or the weld surface doesn’t extend out from the surrounding ice.
the welding ice with aluminum method WILL work here. The plate is a good size and the weld surface is isolated.
You can get aluminum plate from Icecrafters or you can often find it locally by looking for aluminum fabricators. You might have realized from the diagrams above that a variety of sizes would be useful. You may be able to get a deal on some scrap pieces. You’re looking for sizes that work for ice sculptures; pieces that are too large or too small won’t help you much. Try sizes like 10”x10”, 11”x22”, or 22”x22”. Remember that you want it to be a little bit bigger than your weld surface. Icecrafters has some of the most popular and useful sizes available on their website.
Once you get a piece of plate, you’ll likely notice that the edges are sharp. This is a consequence of the cutting process and the edges will stick up a bit, making the piece less useful for welding larger pieces. Take these edges down quickly and easily with a small file. Keep the file handy too, because in the future, you can use it to knock down small nicks and burrs that might result when you dropped your aluminum on a hard floor. Otherwise, the burrs leave noticeable tracks in your weld surface as they scrape across the ice.
To heat your aluminum, you can use an iron, put it outside in the sun, put it in the oven, put it in hot water, use a heat gun, use a blow torch, use an electric blanket (yeah, I’ve used that method) or come up with your own way (just find a safe way.) As I mentioned above, however, it doesn’t need to be that hot to work. In fact, making it too hot is bad, especially if the heating is uneven and the plate has hot spots.
After you get some practice with this technique, you’ll be able to see if a weld will be a good one. As you look through the ice at the weld, pour cold water into the weld. If you’re seeing water flow into and out of the weld, then you may need to reweld it. If not, then you may have a very good weld. Ice that’s not welding properly tends to look lighter than ice that is. The bad weld reflects more light where the ice isn’t continuous, making it look lighter. Until I can get a good picture of the difference, you’ll have to try it yourself to see what I mean.
Finally, horizontal welds (like graphics 2 and 3) are better than vertical welds. Vertical welding (like graphic 1) is more dramatic, but it’s somewhat more difficult and the added cold water tends to fall out of the weld. So, turn your welding surfaces to the horizontal whenever you can instead of attempting a vertical weld.
Incidentally, I added this entry a lot sooner than I was going to initially because I got a specific request for information on welding. So if you want to know something and you think I might know it, it doesn’t hurt to ask. Use the Comments section… It’s for questions AND suggestions.
in this video where I sculpt an angel, I show how welding ice with aluminum frees me from the constraints of the ice block dimensions.
more about the origin of welding ice with aluminum
One summer a few years back, I was at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida to do some carving with Joe Rimer of Ice Pro. While I was there, I remembered to snap a pic of these aluminum plate covers that you find in the floor of the convention center. (See below; underneath are the convention center’s junction boxes, with data ports and electrical outlets.)
The covers come up in sections, so if you remove a section, in your hand you have a small square of aluminum plate that’s just the right size for welding smaller pieces of ice onto a larger sculpture. Erik Cantine and Michael Palombo “borrowed” a plate or two for use during an ice carving competition and thus invented the process of welding ice with aluminum plate. I believe it was an Olympic qualifier event, as I think that’s the only time I ever saw them compete in Florida together. At least, that’s how I remember it.
links and related stuff
You will find links to this post all throughout the secrets posts on this site. Pretty much every time I talk about welding ice with aluminum, I link to here. This post is also listed on the ice sculpting techniques page, and you could also find photos and info from this entry on the ice sculpting secrets Instagram account or the facebook page. You can comment there as well as below. And if it won’t LET you comment below, then definitely comment on fb and/or IG. Thanks!
