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Greetings!
This section is about building a backyard ice rink. The method employed requires no snow, a few different materials, and lots of water.
I would like to thank elgoodbill, a Cubs fan who has successfully built a backyard ice rink of his own, and has been very helpful in my work to build one.
Experiences with Ice
I grew up around ice rinks. My dad was a hockey player and a hockey fan. When he'd go to play hockey, I'd come along. We'd often go to the Owens Center in Peoria, Illinois once a week, where he'd play hockey and I'd have time to watch not only the guys playing hockey, but the Zamboni ice resurfacing machine at work.
Through most of 1990's, I'd flood the back patio during the winter by dumping buckets of water on it. While we did never try skating on it, we did get a real puck (and not a street puck) out there and play.
When we moved to Southern Illinois, I couldn't make an ice rink like I did before. The temperature would never get low enough for ice to form for more than a few days; it wouldn't have been worth the effort. The first week of January, 2000, God gave me an ice rink. Freezing rain moved through the area, and iced up the parking lot across the street from us. The ice wasn't good enough to skate on, so I went out with my flip-flops on. (This IS Southern Illinois--it doesn't get cold here!) That was quite a bit of fun.
It wasn't until we moved back to the Peoria area that I got really ambitious. It was time for ice to skate on. I read all that I could find on construction of an outdoor ice rink on the Internet, and read another article in a hockey newspaper called Hockey Stop, but couldn't find any real help. The article in Hockey Stop required lots of snow, which was a rarity. We had cold, but no snow.
My ice rink design had to be deep enough to skate on (for outside ice, that's about 4") and require nothing but water. This happens every year on lakes and ponds across the country, so my design was to build basically a shallow pool and let the water freeze in it.
For more on this design, head over to the construction section.
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