Awesome Ice

ECTO’s smart cooling system keeps your back pleasantly chilled while sitting outdoors in the heat. The ECTO Chair connects to any drink cooler and pumps ice water through cooling lines to bring up to 45ºF of relief in less than a minute. Battery pack and sunshade sold separately. Already have a folding chair? Upgrade it with the TOPR cooling cushion.

Recovering from a knee or elbow injury too big for your old Boo-Boo Bear ice pack? The KT Recovery+ Ice Sleeve helps reduce swelling and pain with cold therapy and a flexible compression sleeve for sore muscles and joints. Chill it in the freezer, and slip it on for comforting 360-degree cooling. Available in two sizes.

Seth Robinson is adept at making metal objects. For this project, he created a 16-pound copper ice press that produces smooth spheres of ice. Creating the press involved lost-PLA casting, sand casting, and machining the metal to create its perfectly round parts. Once a cylinder of ice is placed inside, it can make a sphere in about 20 seconds.

Timeless Aerial Photography captured this brief but amazing footage by flying a drone a few feet over a partially-frozen sea. They couldn’t shoot for long due to the unpredictability of the waves, but what they did record is wonderfully soothing and immersive. Best watched in full screen 4K with headphones on.

We’ve seen a car and a motorcycle drive on a frozen lake using sawblades for wheels. Fortek_nine did the same thing, only they attached small circular sawblades to a powerful R/C car. After giving it a test, they raced the beast against another R/C car riding on spiky screw tires to see which would grip better.

Ice seems like a terrible material from which to build tools. That didn’t stop JaDropping Science from giving it the old college try by making hammers from ice. The trick is to combine the ice with absorbent materials to provide strength. Place your bets now on which stuffing will best reinforce the ice hammer.

Despite being made from ice, an igloo can provide shelter from harsh winter conditions. YOGOMAN headed to a frozen lake, carved out thick blocks of ice with a chainsaw, and then assembled a sweet double-decker structure to shield him from the brutally cold weather outside. It took him nearly a month in frigid temperatures to build the structure.

Winter is upon us, and with that comes the chance of ice on the ground. You could try to break it into pieces with a snow shovel and toss it to the side, or you could do what this person did: blow the sheets of ice out of the way with a leaf blower. The technique might not always work, but under the right conditions, it looks tremendously satisfying.

Have you ever wondered what goes on inside your freezer’s ice machine when it’s making all those clacking noises? Instagrammer povsadventures used his Insta360 GO 3 camera to capture the mechanism in action as it detects when the door is closed, fills the tray with water, checks the temperature, and then dumps ice cubes into the bin.

Here’s a fun winter activity – a tractor that pulls 28 people on innertubes around a frozen lake. This ride can be enjoyed in Heihe, China, a popular destination for tourists from nearby Russia. We see no reason the same can’t be done anywhere you have a tractor, a frozen lake, and a bunch of rope – the more powerful the tractor, the more people you can pull.

We already know it’s possible to drive a car on a frozen lake using sawblades instead of wheels. The guys from CboysTV attempted the same feat with a dirt bike. To pull off the crazy stunt, they fabricated 100-pound steel sawblade wheels for both a dirt bike and an ATV. The blade wheels work shockingly well, though falling off could be deadly.

Why you would want to glide around on skates made out of ice is anyone’s guess, but Works By Design got us to watch his video regardless. He started by testing various mixtures of water and binders for strength. After that, he fabricated custom metal blades and a special silicone ice mold. Our feet are freezing just looking at this thing.

Ryan Cook is a master at carving sculptures with his chainsaw and hand tools. Most of his works are in wood, but he made this amazing sculpture of a toucan out of ice. He carved the intricate bird from a single block of ice and finished the entire bird in just two hours. We can’t decide if the crystal clear beak or the feathers are our favorite part.

Parking your car outside in the wintertime can suck. The Scrape Buddy makes getting ice off your windows easier with its ergonomic design and strong, diamond-polished acrylic edge. Its 5″ wide blade scrapes away ice quickly, and it’s small enough to keep in your glove box. It’s available in clear or blue.

Here’s a fun family project if you live somewhere the temperature stays below freezing for days on end. The ABC Allred Family shows us how easy it is to build your own backyard igloo from blocks of ice and a dash of food coloring for extra flair. You can make the ice bricks in aluminum foil trays and then cement them together with a mixture of snow and cold water.

This awe-inspiring video footage shot on Lake Louise in Banff National Park shows a literally cool natural phenomenon. This stuff is called “candle ice,” and it forms when the sun warms ice enough that it starts to break down due to air or liquid water trapped between ice crystals. As the ice begins to melt, it breaks easily into candle-shaped columns.