Come out and show you some of the fun stuff.  If you’re joining us, we’re still a couple minutes before our start time, but thought we would let you see our new satellite cart.  I should be demonstrating that a bit today.  This is a… were going to be using for our purposes here today will be the block shaver.  This can put in at the 1000, the 3000 (both cube shavers) or the Block.  Uh, what this has is a small storage area in here.  The hand wash basin.  In there, store your flavors, extra cups. Also has a cash drawer that I can’t get open (laughs).  Try to do things with one hand is always a bit of a challenge.  There we go.  So we’ve got a cash drawer that we can operate on.  And what we do, we simply shave the son cone, hand it to the customer and what you have out here, is all of your flavors.  So we have an opportunity to come in and have eight flavors which you will see from the top, four flavors on each side.  Those four flavors then feed down to the eight that we have down below.  So you’re able to just hand it to the customer, let them make their own. The nice thing about this is the simplicity with which you can move it around.  So what I am going to do is grab my handle here.  All this is, is a pull handle and I can take this anywhere I want to go.  So if I am running on battery, I have 100% mobility, I can move it around and literally take it anywhere I want to go.  Hang my handle back up, there is a little hole there to suspend it from.
Ok, it looks like we are, Oh, we’re not quite 1:00pm yet so will talk about a couple other things.  You will see these posts, holes, this actually has a top that can mount above it and allows you to show, have above it will look like the top of one of our kiosks or one of our buildings.  where it is an attic space that you can store.  In this case, I simply don’t have it on there today.  Trying to keep this a bit simpler and cleaner as we go through it.

Ok, uh… couple things, first off that I need to talk about as we are doing this, I’ll just keep this video going here, hum, as we get into this, we are going to be talking about block ice today and different ways that it is made. And, I need to first… if you are on the website. if you’ve linked on, you should be at www.snowie.com/live on the right hand side, you are going to see three options for communicating with us.  one will be, twitter, Facebook, or what is called open discussion.  all you will need to do on the open discussion is click on that, it’ll give you an option that you can post as a guest, or sign in, I want to post as a guest. you put your name and email and it will connect ya, you don’t need to have any other platform, no password, no using twitter, Facebook, just a very simple, open discussion dialogue in there.

K, with that being said, our topic of discussion today, I’m gunna, turn this around, oh look, there’s my ugly mug, um, as we go in, we are going to go into my commissary here.  What we are going to be doing today is talking about Block Ice.  I don’t know why I did that, I don’t want to look at myself. K, our focus here is going to be block ice.  And, I am going to hand the phone off here a little bit so I can be in it.  There are three types of block ice, there is what is called a compressed ice. And what a compressed ice is, they’l take a, some type, it won’t be a square like this, normally, it will be a vertical square and they’ll dump in cube ice and then fill that with water and then freeze it.  The problem is that it has air pockets.  And you have two different ices, one is already froze, the other, trying to freeze them together. It ends up, putting it into a block ice shaver, it is not a solid block because of the air pockets and everything so it will break more, it will chip.  You will end up with a lot more granolas.  Or actually, our 3000 Shaver, a cube shaver, will shave as good as any as just about any of the compressed ice that’s out there.  So if you’re not going to go to a true block of ice, that compressed ice doesn’t really gain you any advantage over a good quality cube ice.  We can have that conversation another time.

What I want to look at, yeah there is a lot of people that want to make their own ice.  I stuck a couple of these in the freezer last night and I want you to see a couple things you’ve got to be careful of and monitor as you go through this.  For example, if you look up close here, notice how this ice has formed, has come up, what actually happens, it’s really interesting, this bag was closed and as it froze, the ice will actually expand by 11% as it freezes.  So what you have with water, I should have had it 11% from the top.  I was a little less than that, so that excess, actually as it froze, it pushed and came up and its interesting to see these little ridges all that is, is where the bag was kinda closed around it.  It will literally form to that bag, it does it on all of them, just forms to it.  So you want to get where you have your ice a little bit below the level, bring it down about 10% and that way, when it freezes, it will be solid.

So all I am using here, these are… you go into any restaurant, uh, Chipotle or a Wendy’s that has a salad bar or something like that, these are the trays that come out of the salad bar.  You can get them in plastic and metal.  Our experience playing with it, the metal is the better of the two.  Some people like to put the <water> in, freeze it, warm it up, take it out and put it in a bag.  I prefer to put it in a bag first so that I am not having to fight to do it.  So all I have to do to take this out is bring it over, run it under some water,  and voila, its done.  Need my tray.  So, what I am going to get here; now I can put another bag put some more ice in, and its ready to go.

This is going to be my problem when I go to put it in a machine. All I have to do, is take the chipper that comes with the machine, and its ready to go.  In fact, lets take it out and stick it on a block shaver, so walk back out here.

Hold

When you freeze the block ice like that, sometimes its a little difficult, I’m hoping everybody can hear me, if you freeze the ice in a bag, the ice will tend to stick inside of it.  Sorry, technical difficulty here, it helps if I have the power hooked up.  So I can freeze this, put it in, pull off the bag, hold it in place, put it on foot, there you go, and just like that (Ice Shaver Running) you’ve got the snowie shaved ice.

“Is there a message on the phone?”
“Yeah, he just said he can hear you.”
“He can hear me? Good.  We’ve been doing some technical testing.  Ah, nothing better than good quality Shaved Ice.

So the idea with that. was just to show you that you could take those block, or those little trays, stick them right in your freezer, make your own ice…

(More to Come)

Come out and show you some of the fun stuff.  If you’re joining us, we’re still a couple minutes before our start time, but thought we would let you see our new satellite cart.  I should be demonstrating that a bit today.  This is a… were going to be using for our purposes here today […]

Tags: Block Shaver / Shavers