How To Build a Backyard Rink:

  1. Make sure you have a level backyard. You can get away with an 8-12-inch slope, but it begins to get harder if It’s much more than that.
  2. Outline where you are going to place your rink. Make sure the ground is fairly clean. You don’t want any sharp objects that could puncture your rink. This could be twigs, a kid’s toy, sharp rocks, glass, etc.
  3. Determine the size of the rink and the height of the rink. When you determine the size of the rink, make sure you add five feet to both the length and width. So if you want a 35x50 rink, get a 40x55 liner. The liner MUST BE WHITE. Any other colors absorb the heat of the sun, and your ice won’t be as good or last as long. Also, make sure you don’t leave any nets or pucks on the ice during the day while you’re not around. If you’re playing, it’s one thing. But just leaving them out there will melt the ice where they’re located.
  4. If you have a slope, remember to make sure that the top of supporting walls on the low end must be as high as the top of the boards at the high end. So if you have a six-inch-high board at the top of the high end and your hard slopes eight inches, you’ll need the supporting walls to be 14 inches high on your low end.
  5. Now build the braces. The height of the braces is determined by the height of your support wall. If you have a 14-inch high support wall, you must make the height of your brace much higher than that.
  6. Now build the support braces to support the proper height. I would make the vertical post on your support brace at least 8-10 inches higher than the height of your support wall. That allows you room to attach your actual walls. If you use a 2x6 to on your brace, you’ll want room to attach the tarp. If you want full boards, make it four feet higher. That way you can brace the boards to the support brace.

  1. Now build the support braces to support the proper height. I would make the vertical post on your support brace at least 8-10 inches higher than the height of your support wall. That allows you room to attach your actual walls. If you use a 2x6 to on your brace, you’ll want room to attach the tarp. If you want full boards, make that vertical post four feet higher. That way you can brace the boards to the support brace. Also, make sure that supporting wall is at least six inches higher than the height of your ice. That gives your tarp some room for some wiggle room. If you use full-sized boards, that supporting wall won’t have to be as high as the top of the boards, only six inches above the top of the ice.
  2. Use 5/16- or ¼-inch lag screws through the grommets to attach the tarp to the brace.
  3. Make sure you have plenty of slack in your tarp and also make sure that you have braces entirely around the tarp so that the weight of the water doesn’t try to push it out and rip the tarp. When you fill up the liner, you’ll want to make sure that it’s supported by the boards and isn’t supporting the weight of the water by itself.
  4. Once the ice is frozen, attach the small piece of 2x4 or 2x6 to the vertical board on the brace. Then attach a longer 2x6, 2x8, 2x10 or whatever to that small piece. It should span the length of several braces and join another long board at the next brace.
  5. Now that you have the braces, join the walls together, attaching them to the braces. You will need to make sure that the walls intersect at the braces. One thing I did was got some metal brackets from Home Depot to secure them to each other and then attached that join to one of the braces.
  6. Start skating!
  7. Make sure to remove pucks, nets, etc. off the ice at the end of the day. Any dark-color objects will absorb the heat and leave holes in the ice.
  8. Use a floor squeegee to get the snow off the ice before resurfacing. It also helps you to get hot water (if you can) to resurface it. Use a hose to spray on mist on the rink or drag it with a wet towel following behind you to drag the smooth surface. I hope this helps. You can also make your own Zamboni, using water, a hose, and rubber mat. There are plenty of directions on how to do this on the web.
  9. If you want to put a logo at center ice, go get a fathead. They have these special ones that are supposed to stick to the concrete. I’m going to get one next year and stick it to plexiglass. Then I’ll put down my first layers of ice. Then I’ll place it down and put another layer over it. It should look sweet.
  10. If you’re looking for protective netting, go to Amazon. It’s a lot cheaper than a lot of these places.

Look at the following web sites for tips:

– great site for info on how to build it. Lots of people posting on here.

– good place for liners

-- Good deals on liners.

As you can see, this guy used his braces to build the liner all around. I don’t know how he got his liner under the boards. It’s in Canada, so it may have been cold enough for everything to freeze.