The Mount Holly news., 1914-12-29
Fla. Am Ice Plow With a Guide Gauge.

prepared by the United States Depart
ment of Agriculture.)
In harvesting ice, very different
methods are required for that which
is not over four inches thick and ice
from six to fifteen inches in thick
ness. The thin ice generally will be
broken into fairly regular cakes,
which will be loaded as best they may
into sleds or wagons and hauled to
the storehouse. Here they should be
arranged in layers and adjusted as
closely as possible. The spaces be-
tween the cakes should be filed with
crushed ice or snow to cause the
whole mass to freeze into block Of
ice as solid as 1t is possible to make.
1t is more difficult to store and keep
ice of this character than that har-
vested in regular cakes.
Thin ice is characteristic of the
southern limits of the storage of nat
ural Ice. The supply is more or less
uncertain and the storage period is
long. The irregular form of the cakes
makes it difficult to pack the ice so
as to prevent air spaces, which may
form air passages and cause rapid
loss Irregular blocks and cakes are
less easily insulated than cakes of
uniform size and thickness. If the
mass is stored in a building without
packing materias about it, insulation
must be provided in the construction
of the house. The walls must be
thick, well packed with mill shavings
or dry sawdust, and tightly boarded
on both sides of the packi-g material.
A space of Is inches between the
walls, tightly packed with good in
sulating material, Is none too much.
An added safeguard would be to
double both the outside and inside
walls. The type of wall construction
suggested in Fig. l would be suit
able for house intended for the stor-
age Of ice Of this character.
Harvesting ice from six to fifteen
inches in thickness permits the use
of tools and implements that find no
place in harvesting thin ice. The
field may be laid off so as to cut the
cakes to standard dimensions of %
by % inches or 22 by 80 inches. OBJ
long cakes have some advantages over
square ones, as they can be Tapped
to break joints as they are stored
thus reducing the possibility of the
formation of air passages in the ice
heap.
In order to obtain cakes square or
rectangular in form, square made
from light strips of boards with
straight edges may be used. A
square with sides twelve to six
teen feet long will serve the purpose
nicely. Draw line across the ice
field parallel with each side of the
square and with a hand marker or
with saw accurately follow this line.
BY the use of plow with a gauge
attached, such as Is shown in Fig. Q,
the field can be cut into parallel bands
or ribbons. If the harvest is an ex-
tensive one and the water is of con-
siderable depth, after the field is
piowed at right angles to the first
plowing the ice may be barred of in
large masses or strips and 1oated to
the shore or loading place, where it
can easily be broken by an ice spud
or bar into cakes of the dimensions
outlined by the plow. The use of a
plow is not confined to large fields or
to ice that will bear the weight of a
horse. On thin ice fields plow can
be used by attaching it to light wire
cable or rope pulled by a horse on
the bank.
FIoe Ice.
Under certain conditions the only
practicable way of obtaining a supply
of natural ice is to catch it as 1t is
going out in the spring. When the
snow meIts and the spring rains come,
the ice at the headwaters of streams
breaks up and is carried down in
large masses, which can be caught at
considerable distances from the lo-
calities where it was formed. In this
way ice can be obtained at small cost.
In the early days many plantations
along the Potomac harvested an an
nual supply of ice of this character
and stored it for the most part in
pits. Those fortunate enough to live
near large streams may often obtain
their Ice supply in this way