what does it do?
what's it for?
yes, i have seen the disney ice princess movie before but it didnt exactly answer my questions.

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Giaz.
scene chav gonna tear you down .. because i'm gonna come and get you!
take the pee, and i'll hit you where it hurts with my toepick.

With use, the ice gets all scratched up. Sometimes there's even deep holes and ditches in the ice. The zamboni is made to smoothen the ice.

It's a big tractor-like machine. It scrapes a layer of ice off the ice, melts some of it (stores the rest in the big front) and filters the snowwater, adds a little bit of fresh water to the molten icewater, pours it back onto the ice and drags over it with a mop-like cloth thingy to smoothen it out. Then when it freezes again, you have smooth ice.
Not all ice resurfacing machines re-use the snow. The ice scrapings which aren't put back onto the ice are usually dumped in the back of an ice rink to melt somewhere, and look like a big heap of snow. Some rinks have a big hole in the floor that opens for this purpose.

If the scraping is set to take off too much ice at a time, the machine can get stuck (this once happened at our rink before our group class). Therefore it is sometimes necessary to zamboni the ice twice, or thrice, after a very busy public or hockey session.

Also, they can be somehow configured to lay ice where there was none before as well, they kind of just spray water in that case, I'm not sure how that works exactly. Probably with a lot of refillings of the water tank, I'm guessing.

http://www.zamboni.com/


The funniest thing I've seen was one ice rink where the grassmower looked identical to the zamboni, only difference was it being about a fifth in size of the zamboni...

Our rink doesn't have Zambonis - we have Olympias. They're basically the same thing, made by another company. They are powered by electricity, not gasoline, so we don't have problems with Zamboni fumes. There's a long electric cord, like for an electric lawn mower, that comes down from a track on the ceiling. We still call them Zams, though. I think that's become almost a generic term for an ice resurfacing machine.

I love how it's a verb too, ie. "Have they Zammed the ice yet?"

It's also my dog's name. I have a 6 lb. Maltese mix named Zamboni.

Remember that story a while back about the guys who took a Zamboni for a joy ride through a fast food drive up window? Wouldn't work with our Olympias - the cord's not long enough!

LOL

www.zamboni.com has a lot of information.

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hee- I was just over there looking if they had anything about protecting their trademark (making sure that olympias are not called zamboni's etc... if it becomes a common name, they can loose their brand name!)

Sure enough: http://www.zamboni.com/trademark.html
(off topic, but when I saw the post about calling olympias zams I thought of this: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/...ou-google.html Of course people will keep doing this and lawyers will keep fighting it)

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-Jessi
What I need is a montage...
Visit my skating journal or my Youtube videos (updated with 2 new videos Sept 26, 2009)

Uhm... can it be that the neighbouring rink to the one in my town has two olympias WITHOUT cords?

I think olympia makes gas and electric. The gas wouldn't need a cord. They also have battery powered electric ones, they also wouldn't need a cord.

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-Jessi
What I need is a montage...
Visit my skating journal or my Youtube videos (updated with 2 new videos Sept 26, 2009)

My daughter will tell people 'You can't go out there until they're done Zamming.' It's so cute! She also has a Zamboni Xing sign on her bedroom door

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deannathegeek
"It's like trying to do a toe loop in hockey skates-you have to have the right tools for the job."

The Olympia at our rink (Coventry UK) is gas powered, that is gas as in Calor, not gasoline.

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Gold: Backspin PASSED One Foot Spin ____ Toe Loop ____ Programme ____
The impossible is just a journey away ...

Ours is calor-gas powered, too, and even though it's an Olympia, everybody calls it a Zamboni!

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Mrs Redboots
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I love my computer because my friends live in it!
Ice dancers have lovely big curves!

I love the name Zamboni for a dog, especially a tiny one! I thought about lots of skating-related names for both of my dogs, but I don't think Zamboni ever occured to me.

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Shae-Lynn and Victor: We knew you were champions, and on 3/28/03 the whole WORLD found out! Thank you for twelve wonderful years!

Shows how (un)observant I am, I always thought ours was a Zamboni!

something I wish our rink had. instead of tractor with a scraper bucket on the back, and a hose to flood the rink.

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Karen

I skate - therefore I am

LOL! You may be one of the lucky ones - it is harder to do a crappy job with a hose than a resurfacer! Around here they are often in too much a hurry and manage to leave the ice rough despite the fancy machine.

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Dianne
(A.O.S.S.? Got it BAD! )

Our rink in the UK used to have a zamboni type machine that fitted on the linkage behind a small tractor. There is a company in Finland now that has a third option to Zamboni or Olympia. They are called Ukko and make electric resurfacers

So how does it work if there's a cord? Doesn't the machine roll over the cord as it's cutting the ice? I don't see how this could work. Or am I not thinking of it correctly? I assume when you mean they have a cord, that the olympia gets plugged in to the wall and goes out onto the ice and cleans it in the same pattern the zamboni does. So wouldn't it get tangled up in the cord?

I already explained this - the cord comes down from the ceiling. There's this track that extends from the bay where they keep the Olympia out over the center of the ice. When they bring the machine out, the cord kind of unreels and there's enough slack to allow the machine to make its circuits around the ice. When it goes back into the bay, the cord gets reeled in again.

Olympia

Sorry, thats what I get for not reading carefully and just skimming. Now for some reason, I have this image in my mind of the cord not giving enough slack and the Olympia guns it to get moving and instead, ends up flying in the air. I have no idea why but I can't stop picturing it

LOL. If the cord reeling thingy malfunctioned I think rather than the Olympia going flying it would be more likely that the cord would snap. However, my experience with those types of things is that they are more likely to malfunction taking back IN the slack (meaning the cord won't roll back up) than giving slack (so the cord will always roll out).

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-Jessi
What I need is a montage...
Visit my skating journal or my Youtube videos (updated with 2 new videos Sept 26, 2009)

Well of course that would be more likely, but definitly not as funny. Although how much fun would it be to ride the cord like a Tarzan thing? just hang onto the cord as it goes around the rink, putting on aerials for the skaters watching. And then, when it's done with the resurfacing, you can slide down the cord oh so gracefully and wind up on the ice.

Yesterday 09:39 PM
I was just thinking similar. I have been to SkatingOnClouds' rink and it actually wasn't too bad in terms of resurfacing. It certainly wasn't much worse than when they do Formula1 Zamboni at our rink (i.e. most of the time)!

When I managed an outdoor Christmas rink a few years ago (before I got a real job), we had a little half size Zamboni thing called a WM. It ran on diesel and the damn thing would always wait until the rink was really busy and the ice all chewed up to not start. It was good fun late at night though taking it out and doing doughnuts on the freshly cleaned ice!