the goal is to walk barefooted across a strip of ice suspended 60 feet off the ground in a similar fashion to the traditional tightrope between platforms. what shall we say? 1/2” by 1/2” square by 40 feet in length?. it may be necessary to manufacture the ice poles in shorter lengths and fuse together in situ as I am not sure if you can get iceboxes of the necessary dimensions quite readily.
flavoured ice poles might entice the brave to kneel mid-performance and refresh themselves.
do you think that a 30 pound black pudding would look ridiculous as a balancing pole?
specially engineered ice safety nets would look cool.
as a point of interest: in the 1850s, Jean Francois Gravelet received world acclaim for cooking and eating an omelette (complete with stove and neatly set table) on a high wire stretched over Niagara Falls-- po, Jul 20 2004 ice strength table http://www.mass.gov/dfwele/dfw/dfwice.htm... wish I were a mathematician (thanks to Anne who got me through my GSE) [po, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004] Ice is not strong enough. Your beam will need rebar.-- my-nep, Jul 20 2004 Also, ice is not flexiable, stretcy, or a high tensile strengh material. So - no ice nets.-- my-nep, Jul 20 2004 Whats the physics with the strength of ice? Seems pretty hard to me... My feet are cold though.-- The Kat, Jul 23 2004 Hardness and "strength" are not directly related. Specifically, there are four aspects of what is commonly viewed as "strength", though there is no actual definition of "strength" in a material. Anyway, two aspects are hardness and toughness. Hardness is a measure of how much a material resists deforming. Toughness is a measure of it's resistance to "snapping" (materials with very low toughness tend to shatter like glass, while high toughness materials bend and stretch under force). These two are usually inversely proportional, more or less--the harder a material is, the less tough, and vice versa.
You've also got tensile vs. compressive strength--how much a material resists being pushed and pulled. If you pull on a rope, that's tensile strength, and if you squeeze a brick, that's compressive strength.
Ice has reasonable hardness--nowhere near most metals, but enough that people think of it as "hard". It also has good compressive strength. However, neither of those matter in this application--Ice has terrible toughness and tensile strength, which would be the primary concerns in this application, and because of that this structure will never support its own weight. It'll snap in half unless supported by another material.
And, of course, Ice exhibits NONE of the properties that are desireable in a net.
There are lots of other properties of materials that could factor into "strength", I've just listed the four biggest and most common ones.-- 5th Earth, Jul 24 2004 [Po], that table is for ice on water. The water underneath supports the ice.-- 5th Earth, Jul 24 2004 How about a simulation using HTPE coating on the cable and slippers?-- bpilot, Jul 24 2004 I know [5th] but it seemed appropriate. how thick would this ice need to be for what length? its a shame this won't work at all because the slipperiness factor seemed interesting to me as well as the coldness to the feet. oh well, back to the drawing board...-- po, Jul 25 2004 After it got thick enough, it probably wouldn't support its own weight.-- RayfordSteele, Jul 25 2004 Oh, it could work Po, just not with pure ice. As mentioned, if you put some rebar in it or something, it probably could work. I'm currently actually neutral on this one.-- 5th Earth, Jul 25 2004 oh didn't I mention, there was an electrical current running through it :)
if it were flavoured (make mine raspberry) it would not be pure...
could we use stalactites?-- po, Jul 25 2004 why not a Teflon balance beam-- redpandainventor, Sep 07 2008 why not indeed.-- po, Sep 07 2008 random, halfbakery