A professional Zamboni can cost upwards of $10,000, but a group of dads from the County of Grande Prairie have built their own with a couple hundred bucks worth of PVC piping, valves and a tank of warm water. Scott Roessler says it took him and his Whispering Ridge neighbours Cam Schmidt and Jon Phillips about three hours on Christmas Eve to build it from instructions online.
“It’s pretty easy if anybody wants to [try]. If you look at the pictures it’s a pretty simple contraption, but it does make the ice way better. It’s a little bit of work but it was kind of fun building it; it’s been a good time.”
The machine is loaded up on the back of a side-by-side, with a mechanical arm attached to a beach towel that acts as a polisher for the ice. Roessler says they’ve also been able to improve it since they first tried it out Sunday.
“We had to figure out how to get in to the square corners, so we built a little modification to it today and have a broom that we can use now.”
The rink itself was built just a few weeks ago with materials supplied by Crosslink, the subdivision’s builder. The Zamboni has since fixed any issues they had with bumps and chipping and since it only takes about 10 minutes to flood the ice, the trio hopes to keep it maintained all winter.
Check out the homemade Zamboni in action: