I'm new to outdoor ice and in need of a little help.

I have a 60X50 rink on a small lake in St Paul, the lake is small and froze early. I scraped the snow and the ice was nearly perfect. The people I bought the house left a auger and pump for rink maintenance so I decided I'd freshen up the ice - disaster. The rink went from smooth to un-skateable. The problem is that while flooding the water would partially freeze and then be pushed when I came back to finish the area.

This slush has frozen and basically the whole rink is covered by 1/2 inch bumps and ridges. I plan on building a rink rake tonight and was thinking that a half dozen coats with it might do the trick but this is just a guess. I am using lake water and I have plenty of flow, 1450g.p.h. I could get hot water but doing so would require another 100ft hose and I'd just generally prefer to use lake water. I'm a generally smart and handy guy but I've tried reflooding a couple of times and each time I seem to have a different problem with the ice but this is the worst.

Any help is appreciated.

J

I've never resurfaced a lake using lake water, so I may not be of help...but I wonder if you had a bit of snow or skate shavings on your ice before spraying it. I know that if I try to spray my rink with shavings, all the shavings ball up and you end up with hundreds of little frozen rocks all over the place. The remedy, once it's frozen, is to just keep resurfacing and using some sort of metal floor scraper to grind them down. Good luck!

I made the rink rake, a.k.a. homeboni, earlier this week and I've resurfaced the ice about 4 times and it is coming around. I think the problem I have is that the water begins to freeze pretty quickly after applying it. I think this is happening mainly because the water I am using is from the lake, elementary physics says it should be 39 degrees much colder than tap water. Within a minute or two, the time it takes to make a pass the water is getting slushy and if I disturb it with water flow from the hose or the homeboni it chunks up. The waterflow from the hose was very powerful and worsened the effect and the homeboni seems to be helping a lot. it was a little warmer today and I flooded again. I'll check again in the morning.

Glad to hear that you are making progress smoothing out all of the rough patches. Once you get the ice mostly smooth, the homeboni should put down a thin enough layer each time to prevent the ice from chunking/slushing up. I had a pond rink for a nuber of years and tended to have the same problem that you described from time to time.

Someone earlier in the thread mentioned a floor scraper and I definitely second that suggestion! I use a cheap $20 scraper that I picked up at Home Depot (QEP 14 in. Floor Surface Scraper) and it works very well to shave off some of those persistent bumps/chunks.

I'm just across the river from you in Minneapolis and looks like great skating weather heading into the new year!

When our rink froze the first time, it was during a cold snowstorm with blizzard like winds. Result=plenty of ridges and bumps on the surface. After it was solid enough to support us we just starting skating on it, going right over the bumps. Definately not ideal, but after a couple of hours most of the bumps were cut off and then we swept it one time and ran our homebonie and had nearly perfect ice. We had about eight people on the rink when we did it, so with only one guy skating it might take longer to work all the bumps off. cheers, jesse