When Charles Johnson said, “Let’s go fishing,” his first stop was in his barn to get ice.
He sauntered up to a small home chest freezer with a couple of wires and a hose sticking out of the top and voila — I beheld what he dubbed his “redneck ice machine.”
“I used to bag ice from my kitchen refrigerator/freezer’s ice maker in recycled bread bags. That got to be a hassle, so I started thinking, ‘Why can’t I get an ice maker that dumps directly into a small freezer?’ I looked on the Internet and couldn’t find anything, so I made my own.”
His design is simple, but effective.
He bought a small chest freezer and mounted a GE refrigerator ice maker in the freezer basket that came with the freezer. The ice maker dumps its ice directly into the main freezer.
He ran the wires and water-supply line for the ice maker through the lid of the freezer.
“I learned the hard way not to drill through the side of the freezer,” he said with a grin. “The sides are full of copper coils. Drill only through the lid.”
The hardest part of making his ice machine was figuring out the wiring, he admitted. He also cautions builders to be sure to align the water-supply feed with the intake for the freezer tray before drilling holes in the lid.
Johnson is happy with his ice machine. The chest freezer cost $150 and the ice maker cost $40.
“That’s less than $200, compared to thousands for a commercial ice machine,” he bragged. “It’s slow, but it makes ice 24 hours a day.
“I always have ice.”
