Driving the engine that drives our hockey culture
An inside look at the most impressive rink equipment of all — the Zamboni
If you’ve ever watched a hockey game, you’ve seen one in action. Doesn’t matter if it’s shinny at the local community centre or an NHL playoff game, there will be one circling the ice every so often. Its official name is an “ice resurfacer” but most just know it as a Zamboni.
I decided to travel from small towns to NHL cities to learn more about these machines.
The town of Okotoks features an exceedingly nice community centre, complete with three skating rinks. Scott Dyck is the indoor facility operator at the Okotoks Pason Centennial Arenas.
“We’re in charge of (running) the whole building. Everything from resurfacing the ice, to anything mechanical, to daily janitorial,” he said.
Think of an ice resurfacer as a giant shaver complete with warm aftershave; that’s essentially how it works. First, the ice is pre-washed with cool water, called conditioner. This removes contaminants and grit from the ice. Then a blade digs down and shaves the top 1.5 millimetres of the ice. The blade weighs 25 kilograms and is sharper than a kitchen knife. Shaving the ice produces ice shavings, or “snow,” and this snow is removed from the ice via three screw-augers. Two of the augers spin horizontally at each other to push the ice shavings into the middle of the machine, where a third, vertical auger carries the snow upward and dumps it into a large tank.
That tank is the top part of the Zamboni that looks like the hood of a car. In the 1950s, one had to shovel out the tank manually, but today the snow tanks dump forward via hydraulic arms after an ice-resurfacing session.
So how did rinks clear ice before they had such machines? It took a crew of four guys a couple of hours to spray the rink down and resurface it with hand tools. (The insult “hoser” comes from being the poor sap who had to hose down the ice.) But in sunny California, Frank J. Zamboni envisioned a better way.
He started experimenting in 1942 and made his first successful prototype in 1949; a gangly beast of steel, WWII surplus parts and plywood. It had truck running gear with four-wheel drive and fourwheel steering.
The first NHL team to use a Zamboni was the Boston Bruins in 1954. By 1963, the HD model had basically become the Zamboni as we know it. The modern 500-series Zambonis cleaning rinks today date to 1977, but with many improvements
Zamboni machines became popular in the complete absence of any competition for decades — until a Canadian company (cleverly named Resurfice) built its first self-propelled ice resurfacer in 1974. In 1981, Resurfice trademarked Olympia as its model name.
Drivers say that, depending on the model, an Olympia machine has a slightly tighter turning circle (a huge asset in clearing ice) but that mostly, the two brands drive in a similar fashion.
Modern Zambonis (or Olympias) usually feature one of three drivetrains. Some still use V8 truck engines converted to run on propane, some use small four-cylinder forklift engines, but a growing number are powered electrically.
The cost of a new ice resurfacer isn’t cheap. They start at about $135,000, and just like a car, options can take that price much higher, even upwards of $200,000.
Driving an electric-powered Olympia was more than a little intimidating. Despite the inherent weirdness of such a device, the controls were mostly familiar. It has a gas pedal, a brake pedal, steering wheel, and a three-position shifter labelled F, N, and R.
I push the tiny lever into “F” and away we go onto the ice! The one I was driving was governed at six km/h and that felt like a million miles per hour on the ice. I didn’t even try cutting close to the boards like the pros do, but visibility on that vital front-left corner (you always ice a rink clockwise) is pretty tricky with that big snow tank sitting in front of you.
Driving is only half the challenge — and it’s the easy half. Dyck was riding along with me to work the actual ice-resurfacing part of the operation while I made drunkenly crooked lines across the rink. Dyck was constantly adjusting the amount of water coming out of the hot-water sprayers as well as the pitch and depth of the cutting blade. Ice resurfacer operators do all this on the fly, though some modern machines, like this Olympia, have systems that automatically slow down the water sprayers to correspond to vehicle speed.
Having driven a Zamboni at a local rink, it was time to head for the NHL. I was rinkside at the Scotiabank Saddledome in Calgary during an NHL practice.
The Saddledome uses three Zamboni Model 526s. There are two main units and a third reserve unit. All are powered by propane-fuelled Mitsubishi forklift engines. They also have advanced (and expensive) laser systems that help level and align the cutting blades. An elite eight-strong crew maintain and drive these machines some for more than 30 years. Whereas a single Zamboni can clear a rink in just under 10 minutes, the Saddledome operators drive them two at a time and can clear a rink in about 4.5 minutes.
They are the guardians of the ice, ensuring a level playing field for competing teams. And if you’ve ever looked out at the Zamboni making its rounds and wondered if that job is fun, I can tell you: Yes, yes it is.