ALLENTOWN, Pa. – The City of Allentown is getting ready to drop one of the world’s biggest hockey pucks on New Year’s Eve.<\/p>\n
This will be the 4th year the city has continued the tradition, and we spoke with some of the companies that made the puck a reality.<\/p>\n
Inside the PPL Center, the New Year’s Eve Lehigh Valley Phantoms hockey puck was getting the bolts drilled in and its vinyl cover ready Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“Originally it was supposed to be 9 or 10 feet or something. I said no, that’s not big enough, so we started to look at something much larger,” said Bart Kline.<\/p>\n
Kline owns Richmond Machine and Welding, the company that built the aluminum frame for the puck.<\/p>\n
“To make things structurally sound, you’re kind of trying to create triangles and not just a circle, which is, circles are very collapsable,” said Kline.<\/p>\n
Then the thing had to be wrapped with a hockey puck design. That was accomplished by the company Fast Signs.<\/p>\n
“You can see this from every angle, 360. That’s a new one for me,” said production manager Danny Drzewiecki.<\/p>\n
Drzewiecki said they also had to figure out how to make it glow.<\/p>\n
“There is no outlet 100 feet off the ground to power a sign like this, so we use car batteries to do that,” said Drzewiecki.<\/p>\n
Sitting on top of the more than 20-foot-tall hockey puck is a sign displaying the new year, 2026, but it’s only going to light up when the puck finally drops. When it was first made in 2022, Kline said he was afraid it wouldn’t work.<\/p>\n
“I had these nightmare visions of, oh my God, it’s going to drop. It’s going to roll down Hamilton Street,” said Kline.<\/p>\n
But it stayed up, impressing people across the Lehigh Valley, and the world.<\/p>\n
“I had some customers in Canada that saw it. They were upset,” said Kline. “They didn’t want us Americans to have the biggest hockey puck.”<\/p>\n
A massive symbol to ring in the new year that’s uniquely Allentown.<\/p>\n
“Mechanicsburg has the wrench they drop there. Bethlehem has the Peep, so this is something the city can say is theirs, and we’re happy to be a part of that,” said Drzewiecki.<\/p>\n
And a third company makes the whole production possible: Fast Lane Towing. They’re the ones that get the puck to the center of downtown to be dropped at the stroke of midnight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – The City of Allentown is getting ready to drop one of the world’s biggest hockey…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74137,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,18221,28],"class_list":{"0":"post-74136","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-allentown","8":"tag-allentown","9":"tag-allentown-headlines","10":"tag-allentown-news","11":"tag-new-year","12":"tag-pennsylvania"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}