Sawzall to clear compacted snow/ice?

[Holmz]

Designed and developed to cut through 2'+ of solid lake ice, it makes incredibly short work of compacted snow and frozen banks. Cuts through a 6' bank in about 10 seconds, and the more icy and compacted the better.

How do you get it into the snow/ice?  Its very easy to see how it would cut very easily ONCE the blade is through the ice.  But how do you get it through the 2 feet of ice to start with?  I see it has a sharp tip.  Are you supposed to spin it around in your hand like a top and drill your own starting hole?  And for that 6 feet of snow bank, do you shove it REAL hard into the bank and hope it comes out the other side.  Or are you supposed to climb on top of the bank and cut from the edge back?  The picture you showed is nice.  Just like cutting a board laying on the workbench.  But hand saws don't work too well if you are in the middle of the room trying to cut a hole into a solid floor.  Hard to get started.  The tool here seems ideal for perfect conditions.  But not useful in every other situation.

Somewhere I have a ˜20" long version I made out of alloy with a rosewood handle back in the 80s.
(I cut igloo blocks with it while camping, and the main issue was the snow sticking to the alloy.)
But I do not recall an issue plunging it in, just like in a vampire movie you shove it in.

Ice could be a challenge, but I think like a jig saw without a drilled hole... One can start out at 0 degrees and pull and lift, and eventually get it to be straight up at 90 degrees.

Another method would be a large auger as the ski race teams use for the gates.
They go in about 18" and a long iron bar can pry out blocks pretty quick with the holes are a foot apart.

 

[Tinker]

It was only a few months ago (like about 910) that I was watching the adult males in my world cutting ice from the farm pond and loading onto a stone boat, being towed by the team of horses down to the ice house.  we packed the ice in saw dust and used it to cool the milk as well as cooling for two ice boxes in the house.  The first step to cuting the ice was to be sure no snow was allowed to remain on the surface.  Along about sometime in January or February, I was not much for keeping records in those days, we dragged the marker t the pond.  The "marker" was a wide beam with five or six blades set about 16" apart that the horse would drag first one direction across the pond and then across the pond in the direction 90º to the first marking trip.  That was the way the squares were established.  Then, the hand saw work began. Conveniently, i was too small to gt in on that part of he work. 

I think the hand saw was just dragged back and forth across one of the marked grooves until it went thru to water.  The sawing seemed to have gone quickly once a cut thru had been established.  A groove was cut all the way across the pond (I think) and then that strip of ice was cut into blocks and with ice tongs, loaded onto the stone boat to be dragged to the ice house.  My job was to help with packing saw dust around eeach layer of ice in preparation for the next layer.  I only got to watch the first cutting and got to ride on top of th load from pond to ice house. It was exciting to me to be able to have a responcability of packing that ice.

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Tinker

 

[Mark Katz]

Thanks folks for all the useful advice. Here's some responses and an update.

Re using a chainsaw: Not going to happen - too risky for me. Plus I have no other use for it so it would be a single-use tool taking up space.

Re those who thought the sawzall idea would work: still on my list to try.

Re those older hand saws: interesting.

Now for the status update. Mother nature was kind and gave us a couple of days near 40 degrees. So I cleared it the old fashioned way - with a shovel!

Thanks again.

 

[Tinker]

I wonder why we never thought of that.  ???
Tinker