Does anyone now how to make a carbon(kevlar) hockey stick? I have been thinking about it but I can´t figure how to make a mould.
it would be a 2 peice mould.
i cant really suggest anything, but id be extremely interested if you do try and attempt it.
I would go a different route…rather than attempting a monocoque type design, do the shaft and blade separately. Then, you can bond the two sections in a less than permanent manner, so if one should break, or not be to your liking, you can remake it, without sacrificing the whole project. Or, if you find the blade just too difficult to get ‘just right’, you can add in an off-the-shelf blade and still get use out of the shaft.
Starting with the blade, I would make a wood core, to establish the desired shape and curvature. Lay up the composite onto the core, and vacuum bag it. Trim and machine it to the final desired shape.
For the shaft, I would definitly recommend wrapping a foam core…a 2-piece mold would just be too much of a PITA. Starting with a fiberglass layer for core strength, then layers(s) of unidirectional CF running parallel to the shaft, and finally wrapping diagonally with plain weave, then shrink wrapping to eliminate excess resin. The tricky part will be determining just how many layers of uni to use…but the upside is, you would be able to dictate the precise kick point on the shaft simply by using fewer layers at that area, and potentially extra layers before and after it.
Am I making sense here?
sounds like a good way of doing it. I have a feeling it will take a number of tries to find the right number of layers to get the right flex on the stick.
Agreed, perhaps doing some shorter test sections would be a good idea!
Do the major manufacturers of these types of things use preforms and RTM?
I’m sure they would, if they are as higher production numbers. But I think most are still made from wood.
I have been Tivoing “How it is Made” on Discovery channel and I know they showed the skateboard process and I think hockey sticks too. You can buy copies of their programs on their website…
I have several years of background in the retail sporting goods industry…and whether it’s bikes, hockey sticks, or whatever, there’s two levels of product…the wannabee cheap stuff that imitates the top-level product, and the real deal. You see the wannabee stuff in Wal-Mart, Sport-Chek, and that kinda place. The real deal product is pretty much exclusive to specialty shops.
On the cheap product, where the retail price is quite low, manufacturing must be as cheap as possible. Here, it might actually be feasible to manufacture the shafts of a hockey stick in a pultrusion-style machine, but unless the production run is very high, it’s unlikely to be used.
All the manufacturing of the 2nd level product is subcontracted out to builders in Asia. You provide a prototype, they do a test run, if you approve it, they build it. Couple things you can bet on with this level of product.
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Very little CF is actually used in the stick, and more fiberglass is used…and
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There’s a ton of resin in there to fill mistakes, gaps, etc.
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Most of the ppl building these will never have even heard of RTM. This is the old-school paint brush and raw cloth method here, folks.
Bottom line, these will never approach the quality of the real deal, they’re often heavier, inferiorly built, and very inconsistent.
The high end stuff is another story altogether. While some top-level products are domestically produced, at the very least, they are made in dedicated facilities owned or leased by the manufacturer.
Here, you do see the use of prepregs, autoclaves, but I have yet to hear of any RTM being utilised…
I recall the Easton Sy-Core stick in particular, this was a low-production run stick that really took off, so much so that for the playoffs, as players were breaking their sticks and the company ran out, and the players were running low, the companies actually had to go out and purchase them from retailers to keep the NHL’ers supplied.
I was in contact with an Ohio company once a few years back. They have a pultrusion process ongoing and are producing shafte only. They know that someone else is making the blade and told me that they heard the blade was a bals core wrapped in glass and carbon.They were using a specially wound sock and pulling it over the bals core. The it is placed in a mold and heated. The sock was prepreg
Interesting…the sock approach would certainly make manufacturing easy, since you could just stretch the ‘sock’ to narrow it up where it needs to get skinny…