How hockey sticks are made
A composite stick's flex rating is the force, in pounds, it takes to bend the shaft one inch.
- stations
- 7
- things upstream
- 70
- raw sources
- 23
- steps from the ground
- 10
The short version
Most ice hockey sticks are now one-piece composites. Sheets of carbon fiber already soaked in epoxy are cut, stacked with their fibers at chosen angles, and wrapped into the shape of a shaft and blade. Cured under heat and pressure in a mold, often with an inflatable bladder pushing from inside, the stick is then trimmed, sanded, painted and labeled with its flex.
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Cut the prepreg sheets
Carbon fiber cloth comes already impregnated with partly cured epoxy, a material called prepreg. It is kept frozen, at about -20 °C, so the resin does not finish reacting before it is used. Cutters slice it into plies shaped for the shaft and blade.
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Stack plies at angles
Plies are layered with their fibers pointing in different directions, such as 0°, +60° and -60°, to tune how stiff the shaft is and where it bends. Fiberglass layers are often mixed in with the carbon.
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Wrap around a bladder
Workers roll the stacked plies around an inflatable bladder or a foam core so the shaft and blade come out hollow and light. Next, the bundle goes into a two-part metal mold of the stick's final shape.
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Cure under heat and pressure
The mold closes and heats while the bladder inflates, pressing the layers hard against the mold walls. That pressure squeezes out air bubbles, which would weaken the stick, and the epoxy hardens into one solid piece.
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Trim and sand
Excess resin at the mold seams is ground away and the surface is sanded smooth for paint.
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Paint and print the flex
The stick is painted and printed with its graphics and flex number, which runs from 40 to 160. A 100 flex shaft needs 100 pounds of force to bend one inch.
flex 40 to 160
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Check curve and flex
Samples are bent to confirm the flex, and blade curves are measured. In the NHL a blade may curve no more than 19 mm.
Worth repeating
- The oldest known hockey stick dates to the mid-1830s and was carved from sugar maple for William "Dilly" Moffatt.
- Laminated wooden sticks arrived in the 1940s, and fiberglass coatings followed in the 1960s.
- Composite Busch of Switzerland brought the first successful one-piece carbon fiber stick to market in 1992.
Back to the ground
Follow every input upstream and hockey stick starts as these 23 raw sources.
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Sources
These sources say little about the factory steps themselves, so parts of this line are a general description. Treat the details with care, and tell us if you know better.
Cite this page: "How hockey sticks are made." Assembly Line, 2026-11-03. https://assemblyline.org/make/hockey-stick