Bent Lamination Field Hockey Stick

After having decent success with sculptural woodworking projects like a canoe paddle, I wanted to do something more unique. I decided a field hockey stick would be a fun challenge. The issue with making a field hockey stick is the hook shape on the end. If you were to simply cut the stick out of a solid piece of wood, the hook would snap off with the slightest impact. This is because the grain would be running parallel to the potential fracture line leaving it very vulnerable. The correct way to solve this is bent lamination. This involves bending and gluing thin layers of wood into the desired shape and then letting them dry into a solid piece with the curved shape locked in. To accomplish the tight radius of the hook shape, steaming the wood and high forces are a necessity.

My solution was to do a bent lamination but instead of using the bend to create the hook, I used it to accomplish the gentle curvature of the face that is typical of hockey sticks. To solve the grain orientation issue at the hook, the center laminate inside the hook was oriented perpendicular to the rest of the material. This means the hook is supported by grain aligned with the direction of loading. Whenever bent laminations are done, you need to plan for spring back in the material. This is a function of the layer thickness, desired radius, and the number of layers. Interestingly, it is independent of the young’s modulus of the material. By measuring a “real” hockey stick and applying a correction factor for spring back, I could estimate the radius I would need for my forms. After a very stressful glue-up with some cursing, I was able to remove the clamps. My biggest worry was having voids between layers that would show up once I start shaping the stick. Fortunately, this was not the case.

After cutting out the profile on the band saw, I started sculpting the shape using a grinder with a flap disk. I couldn’t use a plane or spokeshave due to the bizarre grain orientation that would not play nicely with hand tools. The flap disk worked very well to rough out the shape of the stick. Finally, I sanded the stick with a palm sander for what felt like an eternity. Instead of using a brush-on finish, I experimented with a spray finish. This left a very smooth finish that I haven’t been able to achieve previously. Overall, I am very happy with the finished product as was the recipient.