These Electric Ice Skates Finally Make the Sport Effortless

You probably haven’t noticed this, but athletes tend to be in very good physical condition. That is because most sports require a high level of fitness. You’re going to have a hard time winning a 100-meter dash if you collapse from exhaustion after 20 meters of sprinting. If you’re out of shape like I am, then you’ll probably agree that it isn’t fair that we don’t get to join in the fun. Apparently Simon Sörensen, of the RCLifeOn YouTube channel, felt the same way, which is why he designed these electric ice skates to make the sport effortless.

People have been ice skating for thousands of years, but until now the activity has always required substantial physical exertion. Fortunately, we now live in a world full of electric vehicles, such as bikes, skateboards, and scooters. That means that the motors, controllers, and batteries for those kinds of vehicles are dropping dramatically in price. The motors in particular are also getting smaller and more powerful. Sörensen just needed to adapt those off-the-shelf components for use with ice skates.

Ice skates obviously don’t have wheels, which posed a unique challenge. Sörensen decided to solve that with an arrangement similar to a snowmobile. He started with a normal pair of ice skates and attached a hub motor to the back of each skate using 3D-printed mounts. Each hub motor has a wheel outfitted with metal studs that dig into the ice, like what you’d see on winter bike wheels. The mounts pivot and had springs to push those wheels down into the ice, though they couldn’t provide enough tension and were eventually swapped out for solid rods.

Sörensen doesn’t provide much detail about which electronic components were used, but they all seem to be off-the-shelf parts intended for electric skateboards. The batteries and motor controllers are kept in a backpack, and a wireless throttle remote is used to control speed. Sörensen lives in Sweden where it is still very cold, so he was able to head out to a local lake to test the electric ice skates. His initial tests were fairly successful, but he found that he wasn’t getting as much traction as he would have liked. So he headed back to the shop, swapped the springs for rods, and added additional metal studs to the wheels. That did the trick and the ice skates worked quite well. The top speed is fairly slow, but they’re still able to move Sörensen at a respectable clip. More importantly, he can enjoy ice skating without having to propel himself like some kind of jock.