Blue label tube, yellow label tube… Got some tubing, now just have to make things fit!



*updated 1/25/12

Well, this isn’t exactly a brilliant intellectual leap, but it’s been a useful way of dealing with various ice sculpture tubing size problems. It can be used with both tube ice luges and ice sculpture display tray drainage tubing. Just don’t mix up the tubing or a guest might end up with a rather unpleasant martini!

Generally you can easily find two types of useful clear vinyl tubing at Home Depot or Lowes: the blue label (5/8” outside diameter (OD) & 1/2” inside diameter (ID)) or the yellow label (1/2” OD & 3/8 ID.) Both of these are intended for use with food and drinking water; just make sure that you clean them out, just in case. (There's also a small green label tubing that's helpful with display tray drainage; I don't have the diameters for it, however.)

Let's say you don’t have enough of one kind of tubing, but you have plenty of the other. You can make an adapter out of the one that you don’t have much of so that you can use the one that you have plenty of. To rephrase this: the yellow tubing makes a tight fit inside the blue tubing. Each can be used as an adapter for the other.

If you’d like to use the yellow label tubing for a luge, then you might have trouble fitting a funnel to it because the tubing is too small. You can use a short length of the blue label tubing as an adapter to fit the funnel to the yellow tubing. (Another way to solve this problem is to use specialty ice luge funnels from Ice Crafters; they fit the yellow-label tubing quite well.)



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Tags: display trays, luge