New ice laid down at First Niagara Center

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) - The lines are drawn and ready for the puck to drop in downtown Buffalo. The ice at First Niagara Center is bleeding blue and gold.

Training camp and pre-season will be starting shortly and the new ice was put down on Monday.

Assistant chief engineer Rich Arcangel said, "The toughest step would probably be getting the logos down. There's a lot of colors in there. You have to get the stencils out and pounce them out and then it's basically paint by numbers, but that's the toughest step."

That may be the most difficult part of the job, but it is not as complicated as you may think it would be. The first layer is painted with 300 gallons of white paint using a Zamboni-like machine. Yarn is frozen in the ice and painted over for the lines. A stencil is used for the logos, and after that, it's just coloring in the lines by hand.

The ice right now may not look very shiny because it only has a 16th of an inch right now, so it looks like a slate. That is so they can add the paint on top of it. But 10,000 gallons of water later will add an inch of ice to the surface.

To keep the ice at around 15 degrees, there is a refrigeration system below it.

"There is a series of pipes underneath the ice. It's got a whole artificial refrigeration plant. There is a whole room down the hall designed to keep this frozen," explained Arcangel.

The locker room renovations may not be done until the beginning of the regular season, but the changes will be visible by the time fans can come. Many of the changes put in by President Ted Black come from the fan suggestions on the team's website. Some are cosmetic, like the removal of old logos and added teams colors, while others are functional, like additional TVs and a shelf for beer in the bathrooms.

One addition to the arena that fans wont be able to see but may help the team is a multi-million dollar dehumidification system to the arena's cooling system, which will allow for better ice to be made.