An inventive grandfather in Colpitts Settlement just outside Moncton wanted to spend more time playing with his grandson than tending to his skating rink, so he came up with a clever way to clear off the ice on the pond in his backyard.
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Don Knee made a homemade ice-cleaning machine from stuff just laying around his garage.
“I am the official snow clearer,” Knee said.
Knee said he will do whatever it takes to make his six-year-old grandson, Grayson Aguilar-Knee, smile.
“He’s a pretty great person,” Aguilar-Knee said.
The 67-year-old grandfather said that when the time came to clear off a pond in his backyard for his grandson to play hockey, he knew he had to come up with something to help with the mammoth task.
WATCH: A New Brunswick grandfather who wanted to spend more time on the ice, rather than scraping it, with his grandson has created a homemade ice clearing machine with stuff lying around his garage. Global’s Shelley Steeves reports.
“It’s 800 feet from the house down to the pond so sometimes that can be hard to do,” Knee said.
The solution came in the form of an old cooler in his garage.
“I put some skis on it, tapped a hole though it and put a pipe on it and a valve and hung a dog blanket off the end of it and I can use it for a Zamboni,” he said.
The end result was unexpected, especially for Knee’s daughter Kerry.
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“When I saw it I kinda laughed at it cause I thought it looked ridiculous,” Kerry said about her dad’s creation. “I was surprised that it actually works, anyone can do it”.
The water-soaked dog blanket slides across the ice leaving behind a smooth sheet of ice and Knee said he is considering making a how-to video so that other people can use his invention.
Knee joked saying the makeshift ice-cleaning machine likely doesn’t warrant a patent, but it does allow him to spend less time tending to the ice and more time playing hockey with his grandson.
“He loves it. He’s only six, so I can’t wait till he’s 12 so he can help,” Knee said.