My Little Experiment

Here's a little experiment I did.... I was watching some hockey videos on YouTube of Ovechkin and in one of them I saw him heating up his hickey stick blade and bending it to the way he likes it.... I guess a year or so ago the NHL changed the rules on how much of a curve you can have on your hockey stick.... They changed it from 1/2 an inch to 3/4 of an inch.... So once the rule got changed Ovechkin said that he would probably get more points that season because he liked more of a curve and in Russia he played with a curve over a 1/2 inch... Anyhow it did help him and now he's the second in the NHL in points... I guess more of a curve gives you more velocity on your shot.... I just thought I would give you that bit of history.... So I decided to try it out on a couple of my sticks.... I wouldn't really advice anybody else to do this because the sticks can be a little spendy and you can easily snap the blade... and the sticks can cost $80-180 so ya it's not a cool thing throwing a brand new stick away before you even get to use it because you snapped the blade trying to bend it...

Here's a picture of the stick Ovechkin uses.... Notice the crazy curve he has on it.... They don't sale any sticks with curves like that....

Here's three of the sticks I experimented on.. One was an Easton, one a Nikebauer, and the last one was a Sher-wood...

I tried it on the easton first because the blade was already broken, so I didn't really care if I messed it up.... The first step was heating the blade up... I didn't have a clue what would happen when I put the torch to the blade... I kinda thought it would all melt..

But it didn't melt.. Infact it takes about 90 seconds of moving the torch back and forth over the front and back of the blade to get it hot enough.... It took me three times before I finally figured out how hot I needed to get it....

So once you get it hot enough you gotta put it in a vice and start bending it before it cools off... Once in the vice I started to bend it... It took me a couple of tries before I realized I needed to keep the torch on it as I tried to bend it in the vice.....

Here's the stick before I bent it...

And here's it after... LOL I hope you can tell a difference.... I bent it about a 1/4 more then it was.... But since the blade was broken it didn't really turn out like I wanted... Least I know now that the sticks won't melt ...
So I tried the Nikebauer stick next... It was a stick i've had for a long time and don't really use it much... I got the blade to really bend out like I wanted but not under like Ovechkin's... I tried it a couple more times to see if I could bend it out and under but it would never bend under.... So I tried it on my sher-wood... It turned out the exact opposite of the Nikebauer.. I got it to curve under but not out...

Before

After.... I was too scared to try to bend it anymore because it looked like the blade was going to snap........ So I then took them to the rink and tried them out... I was really impressed on how much power it added to my wrist shot... and it also seemed to help my accuracy... The one big draw back is that you can't get any lift or power on your backhand shot... The sher-wood was kind of a flop... I had good puck control and a good back hand shot but I didn't have much power on my wrist shot... I don't know if I really helped myself or not by curving my blades. But I had fun doing it... I think for the nikebauer stick to have a better back hand I need to keep the same curve but for it to be more to the front of the stick.... but it's kind of too late for that.... I got bored today because I didn't have work so I decided to give the sher-wood another go at curving it.... It didn't snap on me and I got it where the curve is more to the end of the stick and under... So I think I know i'll have more power on my wrist shot and be able to have a good backhand too.... But I haven't got to test it out yet...