I did the sculpture above in Albuquerque, New Mexico, probably sometime in 1997 for a Sunday brunch. Looking back, it seems that there’s a problem with it. I don’t remember if it was an issue, but much of the water melting off the sculpture probably traveled down the dragonfly’s tail and dripped outside of the tray. The gravity driven meltwater ran into a dead end and had nowhere else to go. To avoid this potential problem now, I would redesign the sculpture or use a larger tray.

    If the drip problem isn’t anticipated, onsite remedies are possible. In the case above, you may be able to solve the problem by turning the sculpture and using the longer diagonal length of the tray. You may have to chip away some of the base, however, to make this work. A more drastic measure might be to shorten the tail.

    Recently, we had a drip problem of another sort. We’d set up large pillars that had flower arrangements on top. The pillars were contained completely within their trays; however, we were still getting water on the marble floors at the event. As it turned out, I had cut the lower surfaces of the pillars’ capitals completely horizontal. You can visualize the surfaces on the capitals by imagining an upside-down staircase (or just look at the graphic below.) Water would travel down a vertical surface, then get stuck with no place to go on a horizontal surface. When it ran out of ice to flow down, it dripped. When it dripped onto the ice below, it splashed outside the tray and onto the floor.

    Since water on a marble floor was obviously a dangerous situation, it had to be fixed as soon as possible. The solution was to change the inverted horizontal surfaces so that they sloped towards the centers of the pillars (see the bottom illustration on the graphic above.) This could be done relatively quickly with an iron. The result was that water flowing down the sculpture never encounters an inverted horizontal surface or dead end, so it doesn’t drip and splash.

    This concept is also important with any sort of ice bar or table. Anytime you have a slab of ice that sits high above and/or extends outside of the tray, you need to be concerned with the meltwater flow and dripping. If you eliminate inverted horizontals by sloping the lower surfaces slightly, you can keep the water under control and the floors dry. I’ve seen examples of ice bars from Ice Concepts (Philadelphia, PA) where their water control was such that instead of one large tray under the bar, they only had small trays under the two supporting pillars. There was no tray under the center of the bar. This sort of set up only works if you pay a lot of attention to the meltwater flow and carve the bar so that all the water eventually flows down the supporting pillars.