Very Excited in New Brunswick

[CoveheadNB]

I must say I am very excited to build my first backyard rink this year! I was very excited to build my first one last year, but alas, that other great Canadian winter passtime (curling) caused me to tear my MCL in early Nov, and I didn't even get skates on until March, let alone time to build a rink.

This year, the boys are one year older (5 & 3), and are very excited about the idea, so extra motivation is at hand.

Now, I must admit, I was even more excited when I came across your website, after doing all the predicted things (reading varying different opionions & designs), and I am very pleased with what I found here.

One comment you referneced Joe was that you now build your rink on a tennis court, where is where I am planning to build mine. That has led to one question: for yr one, I am looking at doing 1/2 the court. I have a solid chain link fence around the outside that I will be attaching my boards to, but I am unsure of how I can provide the needed board support as I cross the span of mid counrt (considering I cannot put down stakes). I have the net posts to provide some support, but I am concerned about the middle. Any suggestions to combat this problem would be welcome!

Thanks! Can't wait to get the pops on ice! (even though it seems miles away consierding it was 17C (63F) here today)

[Joe]

Welcome to the site! Glad you find it helpful.

I've built my tennis court rink twice now, and this will be my third year. My court is 120x60, but I've build a 40x56 rink since we moved here. The first year I built it at the far end of the court, such that the 56' length stretched just about the whole width of the court. This posed a problem in that I couldn't get to three of the four sides with any sort of ease. The ends of my tennis court have 10' tall fencing, so climbing them was out of the question. Instead, on fill day and before the ice froze, we had to walk across the liner. Because the surface underneath is hard and full of sand, dirt, rocks (no matter how good to try to clean it), this left us with a ton of small holes and a very stressful fill day.

For year two, we pivoted the rink 90 degrees. I had some real rink boards (read about that here: http://www.backyard-hockey.com/2010/07/ ... ould-talk/), and I attached them to the chain-link poles permanently, and they became my shooting-end supports. Then I used 2x12 for the other three sides, supported with wooden brackets and cinder blocks. This allowed access around three of the four sides. On fill day, we start by attaching the extra-long liner (I get much more than I need) to the hockey boards, then we unroll it out to the rest of the rink. On any rink, when you fill, you're constantly walking around and giving more slack to the liner, making sure it's flush against the ground and boards. When we had the rink going right up to the fence, it was hard to do that.

I've attached a couple pictures that will hopefully help. And if you go to the main site and hit refresh, eventually you'll see up on the top banner a picture of my homemade brackets. I had them done before I ever started Elite Rinks and sold Nicerink products.