Custom Ice Cube Trays With Instamorph!

Have you ever seen those custom silicone molds with fancy shapes in them to make your own special ice cubes? Well here at Staten Island MakerSpace we have a love for welding and metal. We had this great product provided to us to play around with for a workshop and decided to make our own ice cube tray with metal nut hardware! Instamorph is this fantastic plastic that we learned can do some pretty amazing things and plays great into the maker tool kit!

The instamorph comes in small plastic pellets (see instruction on back of package for proper usage) and when added to the proper water temperature they will soften and become malleable. Once malleable you can carefully remove the portion that you need and begin to work it into a desired shape. We found that multiple dips in the water helped to get it right. Don't feel like you have to have it perfect at your first attempt!

So for our shape we chose a metal nut. It spoke to our maker and metal calling if you will. Its important to make them nice and thin to easily grab the shap. Several dunkings again to make sure you get the proper shape.

For each mold we are going to need to make bars to connect them into your standard tray! Roll them out like playdough until you get the proper length evenly providing pressure.

Heat the components up one by one and begin to press them together. We used a spatula to help maintain the symmetry.

The tricky part was getting it all to stay together when submerging. Our trick was again utilizing this spatula and when it came out to press the components together to make it all work. This was a mock up, but ideally multiple dunkings will help to form properly. Be careful if using weight to hold it down. We learned that can shape the material into an undesirable shape.

The beauty of this material is you can make almost anything! It is machinable, rigid when cool, and paintable if desired. I am attaching some other ideas we came up such as castings for a mask, statues, jewlery, oyster can opener, oyster with pearls, animals, a 3d printer filament stopper or even guitar picks! It was fun had by all of all ages :)