Carbon Fiber Hockey Sticks

Why bother with composites for a hockey stick? Surely, when a player hits that puck they want as much weight behind the stroke as possible? They want more speed, right? The faster the puck the easier it is to get past the keeper before he can react and block the shot? It’s obvious. Wrong! Why do golfers go for such big and heavy heads on their drivers? It’s to put momentum into the golf ball and hit it as far as possible by putting speed into it. Well, hockey isn’t like golf. The only time a hockey player wants weight in the stick is when things get rough with an opponent.

Feel

Composite sticks are the first choice for modern players but were slow to take off when they first came onto the market. The reason is that most players at that time were used to wood sticks and found the transition difficult – their brains and muscle memories were programmed for wood. They believed that they had more feel with wood. There are some professionals (notably Paul Stastny) who continue to use wooden sticks. Most young players today prefer composite sticks, though making the transition from wood can be helped with weights attached to the shaft. Stick for stick, almost all competitive players agree that there is no contest.

Any real hockey fan knows that hockey is a subtle sport. Think about 250lbs of padded player at speed working the puck past an opponent with deft wrist movements and quick changes of puck direction. Feel is important.

Weight

Those subtle manoeuvers are much easier with a light stick and the loading on an outstretched arm is much less. Sure it is hard to think of hockey players as delicate, but the best of them need to have that delicacy of touch, that ability to make the swift flick and fool the opponent. They really do talk about the feel they get from the stick, even with those padded gloves.

Before composites took hold, aluminum was popular for a time, but construction of the lightweight multi-layered tube walls was complex and high temperature heat treatment was required. Lack of ‘feel’ was also a criticism.

Composite sticks are lighter than aluminium and wood - a composite hockey stick usually weighs in the region of 300-500 grams (that’s 5 ounces, tops) but it is not only weight that matters – it’s flex.

Flex and Engineering

Flex is much easier to engineer into a stick that is built up layer by layer as a composite is. How do you make a wooden hockey stick? Well, first off you go find a tree! Get the idea – not really the best place to start is it? Modern materials make it easier to engineer particular performance characteristics into a stick. That’s tough to do with a piece of a tree, though laminated (‘plywood’) construction has prolonged the life of wood sticks.

Flex is important – for example in a slap shot the player stores energy in the stick when it hits the ice and releases it into the puck as the stick comes of the ice and reaches the puck – almost a slingshot effect. That’s where the right degree of flex is important to store that energy and release it. Torque has to be controlled too, so that the shot goes in the direction intended without the blade twisting off course.

Carbon Fiber

A number of composite reinforcing materials (including fiberglass and aramid) are used with the resin binder to engineer a composite stick, but carbon fiber is by far the most popular. Several molding techniques are used and the possibilities of rotational molding are being explored. The ability to tailor blade properties using carbon fiber is remarkable, offering almost infinite design choices to players. Torque and flex can be precisely engineered for an individual player – the top stars have their composite sticks custom built.

The Future

Improved production techniques and higher volumes will surely reduce the cost of mass-produced sticks. Some of the latest sticks are built with carbon nanotube reinforcement which are said to improve the strength/ weight ratio even more than regular carbon fiber cloth woven from solid fibers (‘tow’). And coming up on the outside we now have graphene – molecular thickness carbon sheet -  which could further improve strength/weight ratios and offer more possibilities for the tailored properties at which carbon fiber composites excel.