For the last passion blog of the semester chronicling the interesting creations of my dad I was going to switch it up and talk about his triathlons and discipline in training. However on a Skype call I told him I needed one more blog and he immediately got really excited about the snowmaking machine. Since he is the Legendary Craig Iffert himself, I couldn’t argue.
I shared the stories of our ice rink that Craig makes each winter and the difficulties he has trying to get it into solid conditions for skating and how challenging it is when we don’t have snow. Craig is constantly researching things on the Internet to improve creations that he has made or to research ideas that he has to see if other people have already had them. It’s crazy because I always think all of the things he does are original ideas, and although they do usually stem from his own creativity, other people have thought of them before so he uses their information to improve his own ideas.
In the case with the ice rink, he found some snowmaking machines on Internet that were created by combining a power washer and a compressor as illustrated in this video. He only runs the snowmaker when the temperature is below freezing, and in many cases that only happens at night. One morning the next-door neighbor asked if we had lost power overnight and were running a generator. My dad told him, “No, that was just our snowmaking machine.” The snow maker helped a little bit and was quite the talk of the neighborhood. “In truth, it was more of a slush making machine, but that was fine for our needs,” Craig said.
We have the rink, the boards, the bench, and the equipment. Now we are just waiting for Craig to build a home ice rink Zamboni.