hi, heres a few tips on making sticks. or bats, if you are australian. breadboards if you're european? ah, just kidding.

anyway.

i've been making sticks since i started playing in 93, and have been through a constant evolving process since then, with a couple of periods of heavy experimentation in terms of stick design, and have gone through i dont know how many stages in differing ways to make the things.

i have at varying points manufactured thousands of sticks here in nz for schools players, adults and elite players, both custom to their designs and for the last few years mostly just making my favoured stick at the time for others. i've mucked around with plastics, and mates of mine have even made their own laminates. in the end the simplest always seems best!

first materials... pine is strong and light but feathers easily and doesn't last as long as some wood, can sometimes break if you don't select your wood carefully and for some players doesn't have enough heft or weight for heavy tackling.

some players prefer hardwoods... you can make your stick a bit slimmer while keeping it's strength and heavier wood is sometimes better for passing, with the weight of the stick managing the follow-through for you at the end of the pass... debateable. hardwood sticks tend to get waterlogged more easily and may lose their floating properties unless gently placed on the water for a refs test. of the hardwoods i've tried i like jarra the best, aussie hardwood.

try both and see which you prefer. remember though, when you try a new stick or design, a couple of passes isn't enough. if you really want to find out if the stick might suit you, use it for a week or so, or at least a couple of sessions. give yourself a chance to get used to it, it wont work for you straight away.

don't use ply. it's rubbish. some people use plastic but the stuff that's tough enough to survive is also completely dead and gives no feel of the puck when it's on your stick... and plastic which is flexy enough to give some feel, like the dorsals from nz, flexs hugely in general play and while moving the stick through the water let alone bashing mindlessly on the wall... great for kids starting out cos no need for paint but i wouldnt recommend.

in terms of design, there are so many out there but in essence they come down to a couple of differences, the front passing edge and the angle and offset of the handle. i was interested to read belindas comments about handle size and wrist probs... i think shes probably onto something.

the passing edge can be either straight (like a ruler) or curved (like the front of a steak-knife). this sets a general shape which the rest of the playing area tends to follow, whether you like a huge hook or not. if you are french you might want to put a sheperds crook on the back face of the stick, if you are canadian you might prefer to have no hook at all, and most of us prefer something in between the two extremes. whatever works for you, just bear in mind that a large hook means more wood and greater surface area to push through the water with slower stick skills, while no hook tends to make passing slightly less consistent and slapping down pucks slightly harder. a curved passing edge makes rolling the puck around the tip of your stick a wee bit easier and helps to minimise surface area, while a straight edge makes quick passes off the end of your stick a tad more effective and gives you a flat stick end some people like to use.

i am getting massively sidetracked, anyway, unless you have a laser jig or a lightsabre, a bandsaw is probably the best thing to use to chop em out with, because you can set the table to a given angle which will give you constant bevels on front and back passing edges... none of this doing it by eye with a jigsaw or filing it with a bastard file. dark old days. dont go back to the stone age!

i'd suggest trying an 8 or 10 deg bevel for using aussie pucks or similar, 12 deg for dutch or kiwi pucks or old school SA ones. 10 is pretty all-purpose. whatever works best. i stick the same bevel on the back edge but some people prefer to use that just for curling, in which case dont bevel it so much or at all.

if you do want to pass off the back edge, sorry i'm sidetracking again but... be aware that back edge passing works differently to front edge passing. passing with a front edge, if the puck starts next to your finger it will generally leave the stick halfway down the passing edge, or 3/4 of the way down for a huge pass... very rarely if at all will it actually come off the very end, even though it may sometimes feel like it. (the way i pass anyway, i've freeze-framed it). passing off the back edge, the biggest passes do come off the very end, due to the angle of the hook.... i think this is why you can get such big backpasses with comparitively little movement of the stick. (i dont really know). if you want to pass it off your back edge i'd recommend bevelling all the way to the end of the hook. the trublue aussie sticks have a great inside edge bevel and are good for backflicking... i say this cos i've seen sticks with a flat pane on the hook with no bevel to try to help with curling control, which may help but which destroy the backpass. anyway.

always make a cardboard or plastic template of the stick design you want to use, so you can reproduce the same shape easily... dont just draw around old sticks onto the wood. you need to be able to reproduce the exact shape every time, if you play with sticks that are different you have to adjust every time you pick one up and your progress with skills and passing will be slowed. you should ideally NEVER have a favourite stick. if you do, your sticks aren't made well enough.

when you trace the template onto the wood make sure the template is upside down, ie NOT the way it looks to you when you hold it in your hand... put that top side of the stick face down. then when you cut the bevels they will cut inwards and come out correctly. if you get this wrong, you'll see what i mean, you'll end up with the bevels sticking out of the template shape instead of being cut in.

you can also chop out an undercut of the handle if you like with the bandsaw.

you can use a lot of things to sand off and finish the stick, i've found the easiest is a simple electric drill with an orbital sander attachment. hold this on the edge of a workbench with one hand and sand away with the stick in the other, you can easily get all the angles you need like this and can chomp through dozens of sticks in quick time.

..... put a hole in the handle for string, and use it in big games! we all need string.... unless you go for some weird kind of tape around the fingers or something. anyway, that is quite enough of a ramble.

liam