The First Zamboni Was Welded From Jeep and Bomber Parts

Almost every hockey rink in America has one: a boxy machine that glides across the ice between periods and leaves it glass-smooth. It's called a Zamboni, and the first one was welded together by hand in 1949 by a rink owner who was sick of watching his staff scrape ice by hand.

A Rink Owner With a Problem

Frank Zamboni ran an ice rink called Paramount Iceland in Paramount, California, a small city just south of Los Angeles. He had opened it with his brothers in 1940.

Resurfacing the ice by hand took three or four workers more than an hour. They scraped the surface, hauled off the shavings, then flooded it with water from a hose and let it freeze again.

Zamboni spent years trying to build a machine that could do the whole job by itself, in one pass.

Built From Spare Parts

He didn't have a factory or a parts catalog, so he used what was lying around after World War II. The machine took shape on a hand-built chassis made from war-surplus axles and engine parts.

For the hydraulics that lifted and lowered the scraping blade, he scavenged a cylinder pulled from a Douglas bomber.

By 1949, after years of tinkering, the machine worked. It scraped old ice, collected the shavings in a bin, laid down a fresh layer of water, and squeegeed it smooth, all in a single trip across the rink.

One driver could now do the whole job in a single pass, replacing the three or four workers it used to take by hand.

Word Got Around

Zamboni filed a patent on the machine in 1949, the same year it started working at Paramount Iceland.

In 1950, figure skater Sonja Henie saw one in action and ordered two of the machines for her own traveling ice show. The patent was granted in 1953, and by then other rink owners were asking for their own.

Zamboni's company began building the machines for rinks across the country, and the name on the side became the generic word for what it does. Nobody says "ice resurfacer" at the rink. They say "the Zamboni."

Still Made in the City Where It Started

Frank J. Zamboni & Co. still builds the machines today, more than 75 years after that first one rolled onto the ice. The main US factory is still in Paramount, California, the same small city where Frank built his prototype, alongside newer plants in Canada and Sweden.

Paramount Iceland is still there too. The rink was sold in 2022 to the LA Kings and their partners, remodeled, and reopened as LA Kings Iceland. Skaters still lace up on the same ice where the first Zamboni ever ran.

Every fall, as rinks across the country open up for a new hockey season, the machines Frank Zamboni built out of salvaged war-surplus parts and a bomber's hydraulics go back to work, one smooth pass at a time.