Heated Ice Cream Scoop

I love ice cream and when I used a hot knife to cut foam for one of my sets for my high school's stage crew I thought "hey what if I made a heated ice cream scoop" so I did. I researched how a hot knife worked and what would be a good conductive heating material that could be powered by a battery and all be hand held. I also didn't want it to be a "plug-in" scoop where it would be plugged in to the wall and have an extension cord, it would be too much work. I experimented with different wires and found that Nichrome which is found in many toasters. toaster ovens, electric stoves, hot plates, and hair dryers was the top wire for the job.

I found an old Scoop that no one used in my house any more and used that as my prototype scoop that I would build off of.

I took apart an old hair dryer and pulled out the Nichrome wire and stretched out the end of the wire to which I would attach the battery to.

I used a store bought soldering iron (nothing fancy) and some solder (the silver wire) and flux soldering paste and a file to clean the tip of the iron to solder the Nichrome wire to my scoop. I also used the file to sand down the back of the scoop to make the solder stick to the scoop. I placed the Nichrome wire across the middle of the scoop and heated the wire up with the iron then placed the solder carefully to the wire and blew on the solder to harden it. After that I took the two ends of the wire and spun them in opposite directions around the middle and soldered along the way. To hold the wire during the process I used a cloths pin to hold down the wire, and resulting in that I would have a spiral around the middle which would evenly spread the heat around the scoop.

I cut the Nichrome wire to fit the length of the scoop and soldered on a 9 volt battery adapter to connect with the battery and fitted the battery on to the adapter. Nichrome heated up but sadly did not heat up the scoop as well as I thought for those of you who will attempt to make this try finding a heating coil shape that retains heat better like in a hot plate or electric stove coil shown above by undoing the "spring-like" coil and soldering it the same.

This was my final product but I would change the shape of the heating coil to disperse heat better through out the scoop and it would be more efficient to use. Also I would put a curved plate over the top so the coils would not be exposed.