Time to transform the Rink

Hockey season is completely behind us. Palmer Ice Arena has turned off their compressors. All the lakes are melting, and our backyard rink is now just a giant mud pit with the vaguest suggestion of the red and blue lines still running across it. Now that the weather has warmed up and all the snow is melted out of the back yard, it is time to transition into summer mode. Raking all the winter deadfall and debris out of the lawn will take me a bit of time to finish. The task at hand right now however, is removing the most prominent reminder of winter - the hockey rink.

Last summer we decided to convert the rink into a vegetable garden. We had a nice garden in Kentucky, and loved to go out there and pick fresh herbs and vegetables for dinner. We knew that things would be a bit more difficult to grow in the cooler Alaska summer, but we figured we had picked our crops wisely. Half of the garden would be devoted to pumpkins. We found a special "Denali" variety that was supposed to grow well in Alaska. The other half would be snap peas, lettuce, carrots, and assorted flowers. The pumpkins grew into nice, big, huge even, leafy plants. We were sure we would have pumpkins-a-plenty by Halloween. No pumpkin ever grew. So half of our garden last year was devoted to useless, huge leafy plants. The other half did better. All the flowers grew thick. So thick that they attracted lots of bees. Normally, this is a good thing. Bees pollenate stuff. But Jennifer doesn't like bees (I don't care for them much either.) Needless to say, Jenn didn't hang out in the garden much. The snap peas were the greatest success. The only time there were no peas to be found on the vine was after Andrew had been out there gorging himself on the fresh bounty. This proved to be the case quite frequently, and we would need to slow him down so that we could have some for dinner occasionally. Into the late season, we had so many, that Jenn picked bucketfulls and vacuum-packed them for the winter.

That was last summer. This summer, we are going to do what our original plans for the summertime rink called for: Transform it into a volleyball court. We will have to stick to the original dimensions of the hockey rink, since it is encircled by a box of 4x4s, and I don't really want to make the rink any bigger. This will leave us a bit small for a real volleyball court, but we all suck at volleyball, so it shouldn't matter much.  I have been waiting for everything to melt out there so I could start taking down all the "rink fixtures." Well, that time has come. The first thing that needed to be done was to take all the rink lights down. I had taken 2 - 100 count strings of white LED lights, and 4 - 25 count strings of purple LED lights, and wrapped them around a metal conduit framework surrounding the rink. Undoing the lights was a pretty mindless task, although a bit tedious, considering I had literally wrapped the lights around the conduit once every inch!

With the lights finally down, it was time to disassemble the conduit framework. Again, this was a pretty easy task. I had put the framework up at the beginning of the winter. It just so happened that the week I chose to do it on saw the temperatures dip to near around -10F. I don't know if you have ever tried to apply duct tape to anything at this temperature, but let me just say; it doesn't work too well. I had bought black iron elbow joints to connect the corners, and T-joints to connect the sides. The only quick way I could figure to hold it all together was duct tape. When duct tape is exposed to -10 degree air, the sticky stuff freezes, and doesn't stick.

My answer was to wrap it around the joint a whole bunch of times and then compress it in hopes that when it did warm back up a bit, the sticky stuff would once again be sticky. Well it worked well enough that the framework withstood frequent 70+ MPH gales over the course of the winter. Taking the framework down was a matter of unwinding the tape (which was fairly brittle, but sticky,) and disconnecting the crossbars from the joints. The uprights were mostly easy. Most of them were simply attached to the siderails with a conduit tie. The uprights that were against the edges with no exposed siderail were pounded into the ground. These were the toughest to get out, because a few of them were in as deep as 2 feet!

Now that the light rigging was fully down, it was time to tackle the rails. In the winter, I put up an additional layer of 4x4s to make sure we have a good thickness of ice above the dirt below. In the summer, these come back off because they are unnecessary, and because I am cheap, and didn't buy treated rails like the ones beneath. Besides, Andrew is building a mine in his classroom at school for the end-of-the-year project they do there. He could use the wood for that. So my trusty helper Andrew came out to help me extract these rails. They were tied down only to each other using metal reinforcement straps held in by sheetrock screws. Andrew wielded the electric screwdriver/drill, and masterfully extracted all the screws holding the 4x4s together. That done, the last step was to take down the backboard. This was a matter of prying out the nails attaching it to the underlying 4x4s and unscrewing the 2x4 supports behind it.

So now we are ready for phase 2. Digging. Sometime this week, I will be renting a Bobcat to dig out the dirt to a deeper level so it can be replaced with sand for the volleyball court. I'll leave this adventure for the next blog, as I am sure the fun will really begin here. As most know, no project goes as smoothly as planned, and so far, this thing has gone like cutting butter.