Behind the Scenes: Making Wood Sticks

Wood shafts start out as a plank of premium grade aspen, ash, or birch.

The other day our team had a chance to spend time in our main wood manufacturing facility. The smell of glue fills the air and swaths of rainbow paint speckle the floor and walls. It’s a magical place, like Santa’s workshop, only we don’t use Elves (it’s an immigration problem).

As we wandered through the labyrinth, twisting and turning around massive power sanders, hissing steam heaters, and spinning dry racks, we felt the need to share our wonder and appreciation for the complexity of this great game and everything that goes into it.

Uncut blades are glued to the shaft using our special, water resistant adhesives designed to improve the joint durability and reduce moisture erosion.

Hockey is the master sport, the ultimate combination of player skill and manufacturing excellence. No other sport relies so heavily on equipment or requires so much science and technology. It’s one of the reasons this game is so exciting, because it’s the pinnacle of modern athletics, relying on the perfection of both man and weapon.

Most of you are familiar with what it takes to build body and mind—long hours on the ice and in the weight room—but have you ever wondered about what makes a great stick?

Once upon a time hockey was a purely amateur sport. Players made their own sticks in the backyard—cutting and sanding and gluing their equipment together piece-by-piece. It was a long, tedious process, riddled with dozens of potential errors. Choose the wrong piece of wood or sand too much off the tip and the stick breaks after the first use. Add too much glue or cut the shaft too short and the flex quickly because unusable. The trick was finding the sweet spot, the perfect synergy between strength and weight, power and speed, science and art.

Once the blades are firmly attached, they are sent through a special power sander. It takes just six seconds to cut the blade down to the perfect thickness.

Slowly but surely people began to develop and refine the process of making specialized equipment. They discovered curved blades were superior to straight blades and that round pucks beat square ones. Most importantly, they realized how important it was to have a great stick. This insight was the beginning of hockey manufacturing, a modern technology that enabled people to copy the best stick’s design and creation process, optimize each step, then produce the exact same stick faster and cheaper than it could be done at home.

The results were staggering. Hockey was transformed overnight. The once niche sport—due to the high cost and skill required to make a stick—was suddenly available to the mass market. While the sport was still expensive compared to other athletic endeavors, it was at least possible for the majority of athletes to find good equipment. And so the official sport of hockey was born.

After the shaping process, the sticks go through our special reinforcement process. A special “armor plating” is attached to the exterior, helping to further reinforce the hosel junction and reduce contact abrasion on the blade.

We’ve come a long way since those early days. Most of the manufacturing processes are performed with the help of machines, many of which are self-operated and don’t require human aid. Where wood once dominated the market, now an exotic blend of synthetic materials and nan0-technology compete for player’s hearts. Hockey is quickly becoming a favorite sport not just in the northern states, but across the country. In 1990, there were under 200,000 registered hockey players. Today that number has shot up to nearly 500,000!

Just imagine, all of this was made possible thanks to advances in manufacturing. The ability to create a stick with almost exact specifications on a consistent basis is near miraculous when compared with the home made sticks of ages past.

Below is a video tour of the factory we use to make our wood sticks:

• The Eleven Classic, called “the best wood stick in 10 years”
• The Sentinel, our pro-grade goalie stick
• The Prime wood, a versatile stick that can be outfitted for ice or pavement

This isn’t the entire process, to be sure. We can’t show you everything—that would be giving away our hard-earned trade secrets—but we hope it gives you a better appreciation for the complexity of this sport. The next time you hold a stick, just remember how much time, thought, and passion went into each inch. It’s a technological wonder, and the only thing it needs for perfection is someone who knows how to put it to good use. That’s where you come in.

Thanks for reading, we’ll catch you on the ice!