Brass Puck Usage

Hey Hockeyland,

A recent discussion on my facebook page (CanAm Underwater Hockey Gear | Facebook) took place over Full Brass Underwater hockey Pucks. When I started playing uwh in 1990 we played with brass until about 1995 or so. The brass was fast, stable compared to the plastic pucks of that vintage. The brass pucks chipped and cracked the tiles in our pool an we were told not to play with the brass anymore. I remember seeing the damage around the goal areas especially.

It seems that a few people are trying to bring back full brass pucks. I am worried that these pucks will cause harm to the game of Underwater Hockey. I could manufacture a full brass puck but I believe that the brass around the contact radius of the puck should not exist. I know there are some pools that are super bad/rough and that's why I have offered the CanAm Uni2 Puck with Brass and soon Stainless Steel Sliders. The sliders are not in the contact zone around the outer rim and should minimize any tile breakage and not wear out super fast.

So a couple of questions for other players, countries or organizations across the world:
1. Do you allow full brass pucks?
2. Do you think using them is good for the sport?
3. Anyone been sued or held liable for tile damage or lost a pool due to that issue?

I would love to have a good discussion on this...

Steveo
www.CanAmUWHGear.com

We use the solid brass pucks with the rubber o-rings around them and so far they are the best puck we've played with We have a smoothed concrete bottom (not painted) that is fairly rough. I'd say that probably half of the pools in the US have this bottom as it's cheap to make. To date I can't say we've had any pool damage and that's after playing with that brass puck for over 1.5 years. It has not been a concern for us so far.

The biggest problem people have with the soid brass puck without O-rings is that is that the sticks do not 'grip' the puck well and it's a little harder to throw and control - but it's very predictable. The biggest problem for the brass puck with the O-rings is that the O-rings can catch the bottom as well if they are raised ont he corners. We've had good luck in using roud orings to eliminate the corner to resist catching. Another problem is that the black rubber O-rings can make marks on the bottom of the pool - but painted wooden sticks make more marks. Orings in the past have come off wuite a bit too, but using a single band (vaccuum cleaner belt) or using glue to attach the O-rings is a fix for that.

One other problem is that the current rule state that the puck must be a bright color. Does that mean we have to use brasso on the puck prior to each game in a tournament?

We've tried the pink or green Aussie(?) pucks and they work OK, but they wear out in about three months.

We tried the CanAm Uni and Uni II pucks, but the soft edges catch the bottom o fhte pool like a pencil eraser and stop the puck dead or make it turn up on end or over like crazy lending to slow and uncontroled puck movements which in my opinuion leads itself to bashing style hockey (I can explain more about htis later, but it's somewhat off subject for now). If the CanAM Uni pucks could harden the outer material to that of the Aussie pink or green pucks or if the mateial shoulder could be reduced so that it were kept a couple MM off the bottom or designed otherwise so that it didn't catch the bottom, it may be better.

In the end, for the pool bottom we play on, the best puck in my opinion is the brass puck.

Sparky
San Francisco Sea Lions

In Corvallis we've been using the steel pucks for about 9 months now and people prefer them to any of the other pucks due to the fact that it speeds the game up a bit. The rough concrete bottom is just too slow with other vinyl/plastic/etc. pucks, and as Sparky said, the pucks wear out rather quickly. We're going to re work one of our existing CanAm pucks with metal sliders and try it out. Our biggest problem with the steel is the steel after passing it stops and has no slide to it, whereas the other style pucks actually travel a foot or more and allow for some different play.

We have an expansion joint in the pool that has a tile border down one side of our playing area, and I've seen tiles there crack from the green/pink pucks, so that part isn't an issue for us with the brass/steel pucks. We did have some issue with shooting when not using the goals, but as we have nice new goals, the goals can get banged up from shots hitting the back, and not gouging out the wall. The good news for us is that the pool did more damage to their bottom from pressure washing last summer than we've done in 13 years of playing hockey in the pool.

We tried desperatly to start uwh club in our second largest city of Maribor and made several attempts. One time we even had 50 divers and apneists ready to try it out, and start a club game. The only winter pool in the city, its manager stated that as long as he's in charge, there will be no uwh puck allowed in his pool.

No matter how much we argued our case, how other worldwide pools (Including Kranj's elite pool) have no issue with us playing the game, and how our pucks are professionally made not to damage the pool even slightly, it was all in vain.
Reason was, that in the early 80's, there was a group of divers trying out the game of prehistoric uwh using metal puck, ruining the pool bottom.

So much for metal pucks in Slovenian pools...

We have been doing a lot of trials with pucks over the years here in BC and found that a brass lead combination has worked best for our pool surfaces which in vancouver are generally imperfect tile surfaces. The plastic pucks worked ok for first couple of games but wore down and slowed the game to a slugfest. We ended up going through a new plasric puck every few weeks

Since using brass lead combo we been able to speed up and clean up the game tremendously. Those of you that have come out to CG know what I mean. Using the same brass lead combo at UBC now has improved the game play at that pool as well!

That includes Steves lead puck with brass sliders...worked great!...at the end of the day brass slides and shoots on our tiles best....That makes the game better and we can easily simulate the same game the fast pools gets with matching plastic pucks!!!

We have also been fortunate to have a pretty keen engineer design and build a pretty durable brass lead puck that falls exactly within the hoceky weight specs and seems to be holding up as well as any brass lead combo we have tried. You can check out his design www.tandem-store.ca under construction, coming soon... click on the hockey page! You can oder those pucks through his site too!

Playing for over 20 years in these parts we have NEVER had a broken tile as a result of brass puck use.....remember guys brass is softer than (ceramic) tile.
The finger may get pointed to hockey by the unintelligent! But really there are a littany of reasons why tiles get broken in particular in pools were no hockey is ever played.

ERK

True, tiles get broken for numerus reasons, but to compare brass with plastics used in pucks, the Shore value has to be observed. While plastics in pucks have a middle shore D value such as 60-70 on the plate, and the outer side even on high A values like 80-95, brass dont even enter the D scale, let alone A... brass is much harder and runs on different shore scales.

Tiles, on the other hand, have a shore D value arround 70-75. So your conclusion that brass is softer than ceramic tiles is completly false. If anything, brass is twice harder than normal ceramic tile.

The reason of tile destruction by puck, is mostly due to puck hitting the sides of the tiles, and if there is no spacings, metal pucks can work. In any case, plastic pucks have less chance of damaging the tiles. Our slovenian "prehistoric geniuses" used metal puck on concrete bottom that had a top-finnish of 1cm thickness !

Lazy players decending goals on the bottom, or getting them back up.... now, thats a real tiles destroyer.

When they re-surfaced our pool a year ago, we had to search for a new puck. Our plastic-coated pucks were way too slow on the new surface (Oyster-Quartz Diamond-Brite with 2-inch tiles marking the lane lines). At first we experimented with solid brass, then with solid brass with Rubber O-rings embedded in the rim for improved grip and cushioning. All the designs we tried worked reasonably well, but they all also damaged our pool bottom. In the few months that we used them, we didn't break any tiles, but we did break a lot of small chips out of the Diamond-Brite surface. Even with thick rubber O-rings around the rim of the puck, the brass corners would sometimes impact the bottom hard enough to cause chipping.

Ultimately, we switched to The CanAm Uni2 with Brass sliders. It plays fast and doesn't damage the bottom. Best of both worlds.

And as a bonus, our pool ended up replacing the bottom AGAIN for reasons completely un-related to UWH. So now we have a nice, new chip-free Oyster Quartz bottom (with tiled-in markings for the center spot, penalty spots, 5-and-2s and goals) and a puck that plays quite well on it.