Ice scrapers tested

If your 2 radio turns on when you wake up at half past six in the morning, you can currently hear the scratching time of the car windows. At that moment I am not looking forward to this activity, but once I get outside I grab a whole range of ice scrapers to get rid of my wife's car's windows.

Over the years it has turned out that there are fine and bad ice scrapers. It also has to do with the type of ice that is on the windows. And it has to do with where the car is parked. We live in The Hague and the ice on the street between two flats is always less frozen than on the corner where the wind has free rein. There is also a dead end piece of street. Hardly anyone wants to be there in winter. The snow is not cleared up there and when it icy, the road surface turns into an ice rink. I always call that road the polar bear lane. My Rover P6 was once forced to stand there for two weeks because it couldn't get away. In the photo you can see a number of ice scrapers. The most expensive is the large black one with two crab heads. It is on the left. He's doing reasonably well. Next to it is another scraper with a black handle and a transparent scratching head. It works poorly but is good for drawing lines in hard frozen ice. The yellow triangle next to it is bad in drawing lines but is again reasonable in scratching away ice that is not too solid. The triangle above it is old. The telephone number of Volkswagen dealer Jansen still consists of 9 digits. Company Jansen no longer exists, the scraper still does. That scraper is good. But I take care of it because it is so old. Above it you see a scraper with a handle and a hard red part. There are also ridges on it. Mine is doing reasonably well but my wife's not. Finally you will see a CD box. You can use it in an emergency. In the past I used the box of a cassette tape for lack of an ice scraper. But who still has cassettes in their car?

Text and photo: Jacques van den Bergh