The Sleeman Centre is in the midst of a makeover.
Pucks and sticks are being replaced by rocks and brooms, with the Grand Slam of Curling’s WFG Masters event taking up shop at the arena.
Friday was move-in day for the equipment and material to transition the hockey rink to curling.
But how intricate is that transition? Hockey ice and pebbled curling ice is much different.
“Pebbling, it takes a lot of hand-eye coordination,” said Jon Wall, the event’s ice technician and the person leading the charge.
“We’re walking backwards down the ice at a certain speed for the whole length of the ice. You’re moving your arm side to side and making sure that you get an even spray across the sheet.”
Wall is from the Ottawa area, and got involved in events in 2009 with a colleague of his, Mark Shurek.
Wall is familiar with the Sleeman Centre, as he led the ice-making effort at the last Grand Slam of Curling event in the building, 15 years ago at the 2010 The National.
The first task is to wipe all the hockey markings off the ice, and get a fresh sheet of white ice.
Then, it’ll be measurement time, marking where everything is going, run yarn and freeze everything in some areas.
“After we get that all laid out, then we put in the houses (the circles at the end of each rink), their rollout vinyl material from Jet Ice, and once we put the houses in, then we have all of our own advertisement that’s got to go in,” Wall said.
Three-inch foam will line the ice surface and separate each of the four rinks and the walkways.
Once they get the flat ice up to a certain level, and all the lines laid out, the pebbling process begins.
“We use, it’s called a pebble head,” Wall said. “It’s a head with 64 holes in it, and each head has different sized holes.
“Each head that we use does something a little bit different, so when we’re pebbling it, it comes out as drops out of the holes in the head, and then when it freezes, it freezes up and that’s how it creates all the bumps.”
This is important because the rocks wouldn’t travel that far on the flat sheet of ice.
“If it was a bare, flat sheet of ice, the rock, it’s like a suction cup,” he said. “The pebble actually holds it up and that’s what allows it to go.”
Competition was set to begin Tuesday morning at 8 a.m.
The former junior curler said he got into the profession because of the science behind it, but also the thrill of working at something and creating a product that people like to play on.
“The job is not for the faint of heart,” Wall said. “It’s a lot of long hours, and a lot of constructive criticism from time to time that you got to deal with. But yeah, any ice maker will tell you that they do it because they do it for the game of curling.”
He and his team will be at the rink to maintain the ice throughout the event, from the refrigeration system keeping temperatures right during the games and re-pebbling the ice after each draw.
And then after Sunday's finale, it’s on to the next for the Grand Slam of Curling’s resident ice guru.
