Engineered Ice Cream

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You wouldn’t think that a failed bucket of home made ice cream could help with my engineering career. Here’s how it did.

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Engineered Ice Cream

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When I was a young engineer, I was dating Pam, my future wife, and she had invited me over to a family backyard get together at her brothers wife Brenda’s mothers house. I had agreed to go and asked if I could bring anything. Pam said that I could bring some homemade ice cream. I said sure I’ll bring some ice cream even though I had never made it before.

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I stopped by Gibson’s Discount Center and bought an ice cream freezer and read the instructions. Being a young ambitious engineer, I got out my CRC engineers hand book and determined the minimum freezing temperature of salt solutions and noted the percent salt in the solution. Then I calculated the volume of melted ice that would be contained in the freezer between the ice cream can and the bucket. I measured out the I amount of salt to achieve the minimum freezing temperature in that volume of melted ice. Now I was ready to freeze the home made ice cream.

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I mixed the ingredients and put them in the can, added the ice turned on the machine and threw the calculated amount of salt in and walked away. I came back in 30 minutes packed the top with ice and covered it with a towel. When we opened it at the event it was just soup, not frozen at all. I talked to Pam’s dad who was famous for his home made ice cream and he said Bill you have to keep adding ice and salt the whole time the ice cream is freezing to keep the temperature right. I had learned a valuable lesson which helped me a lot in my career. When you have a task to do always seek out advice from others who have had experience with the task before you attempt a solution. Since that awful embarrassing night, I have made hundreds of freezers of heavenly home made ice cream.o

How hard can this be, I have a Mechanical Engineering degree.

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When I had a problem to solve at one of our gas plants, I always discussed it with the plant operators who operated the equipment every day before recommending any action and my career benefitted. I made good friends with the guys with the first hand experience as they felt they were part of the problem solution. Experience is a very valuable commodity.

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Thanks for reading Engineered Ice Cream,
Bill