It was a sad day.

A great silicone scraper broke. All the Pages loved this scraper. It worked well and it was easy to clean. What a sad little scraper.

I slipped out of the mourning crowd and entered the workshop. I knew a handle had to be both strong and water resistant. Finally, I had a use for that block of lignum vitae! It’s the hardest wood known to man, and it was used in olden days for propeller bearings on ships, and for block and tackle. Carpenters often have mallets made out of a single piece (handle and all) of lignum vitae. A year or so ago, I got a 16″ x 4″ x 1″ block for $10 at a clearance sale at that greatest of all stores, Lee Valley, and I’ve been looking for something to do with it. I checked on the ‘net and found that it’s nontoxic and is often used for spoons and other cooking utensils, so I was confident I could do something for our poor scraper. I took a small section off of one end or the block and set to work with band saw, newly acquired scroll saw, and copious amounts of sandpaper.

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Lignum vitae is incredible to work with. Its sap is actually waxy, so it cuts rather easily and it sands and polishes up like nothing else I’ve ever seen. I stopped at a fairly course 400 grit sandpaper, but I’m sure that if I moved up to 1000 or so this handle would shine like glass with no finish on it at all. The finished product works beautifully and I think it will outlast any of the other wooden spoons (and hopefully most of the plastic ones) that we own.

Now I have all sorts of dreams about other things to make with the rest of my block of lignum vitae, and I’m pretty sure MrsPages does too.

Mrs Ash and Mr Snowy came over to spend the day “doing church” and help us christen the new skating rink. After a morning of great food and worship, we put skates on the kids and spent the afternoon outside.

Everyone had a great time.

Mr Snowy and the kids and I even got some hockey in. As the kids dribbled inside one by one to warm up, things got more competitive. I eventually let Mr Snowy win so we could go get some coffee. *cough*

Two years ago I put a skating rink in our backyard and it didn’t go so well. This year I decided to follow my own advice, use a plastic liner and try again.

The plan: Use 2×6′s to make a frame. Wait for cold weather. Lay the plastic liner in the frame and fill it up. Skate.

The execution:

In October, I laid out the 2×6′s in the size I wanted and used 1×2 stakes to hold them up. Here’s the helpful assistant screwing the 2×6′s to the stakes:

Then we waited for cold weather. Being in Manitoba meant that this wasn’t a long wait.

I waited too long to make the plastic liner outdoors, so I laid it out in the basement. The plastic I got was only 48 inches wide, so I had to put 5 strips of it together to make the liner wide enough. I overlapped the pieces 12 inches, put a bead of acoustic caulk down and taped both sides.

As it turns out, this is a pretty poor way to do it. Cheap duct tape loses adhesion in cold weather. Also, one of the joints I made a different way (before going with the simple overlap method) held a lot of air and floated, making it very hard to cover with water. Luckily it was right along one edge of the rink, so I just piled snow on it and made the ice surface about 20 inches narrower than planned.

When the weather got cold enough I went out to clear the snow from inside the rink, but found that the kids’ games of Fox and Goose had packed the snow into heavy, hard to shovel piles. Hooray for Mr. Doug from down the street who spent a half hour on a -30C on a Sunday morning to help me out!

Once the snow was mostly gone, the rest was stomped smooth and level.

Next came laying out the liner and stapling it around the outside of the boards.

The outside tap will freeze and crack if we use it in the winter, so I hook the hose up to the kitchen tap and run it out the window. I got the adapter to hook the hose the the faucet for $2.49 at the hardware store.

Here is another able assistant holding the hose to start the initial filling.

At this point it becomes a waiting game. The initial fill took about 10 hours. I found that the boards weren’t as level as I thought. The water is within 2 inches of the top of one side and 6 inches from the top at the other. My yard is not level (for drainage purposes) so it took a lot of water to fill one side of the rink deep enough to get water over to the other side.

Even using cold water, filling the rink at night at -30C makes for some neat steam.

In this picture you can see that the far side is full and smooth while this side doesn’t even have any water in it yet. The snow close to the camera is my early attempt to hold the floating liner down, before I gave up on that entirely.

Once the rink was filled, I let it sit for a few days to make sure it was completely solid.

Lessons I learned:

1. Make the boards more level. This will make filling easier.
2. Don’t wait until it’s very cold to fill the rink. At -30C the water freezes before it has a chance to flow nice and level, so there are some ridges in the ice. The perfectionist in me wants to try to create some sort of mini-zamboni to fix it, but even that wouldn’t work at -30, I suspect.
3. Buy a one-piece rink liner rather than piecing plastic together.

The plastic I sealed together has a leak somewhere, because the water seeped out into the surrounding snow before it froze (though MrsPages is confident that the seams didn’t leak but there’s a hole in the plastic somewhere) :

Finally the day came:

And there was much rejoicing.