Sledge Hockey Stick Care

Taping
This is particularly important for wooden sticks. Keeping the bottom of your sticks taped helps prevent them from splitting and delaminating. If you do manage to damage the bottom of your stick use a little sandpaper before re taping. It will make your tape job last longer. Unlike AB hockey, the player is constantly gripping the tape and moving their hand from the tape to the shaft. If the tape sticks to your hand the stick can unexpectedly spin and/or stick to your glove causing you to miss a pass, shot or turn. Here are a few tips to minimize this possibility. Start your taping from the shaft and move towards the blade. This will minimize stickiness in the most critical direction. Run the head of a screwdriver handle over all the overlapped joints to seal them shut. Finally take some baby powder and work it into the tape. This will remove a lot of the tackiness from the tape. Colour of tape has its pros and cons. Black hides the puck well and might make it easier to protect however, it is corrosive to some materials in hockey gloves. Hope you find this useful. Looking forward to some comments.

Picks
Picks give you traction on the ice so it's important to maintain them properly. Poorly looked after picks will loose their grip on the ice and skip which is very frustrating. Picks usually come in pairs for each stick. Make sure they extend beyond the end of the stick equally (unless of course there is some other reason not to do so e.g. accommodate an upper body disability). Most bolts to hold on picks come with nylon threaded nuts which help keep them from slipping off. They still need to be checked regularly. You might find as you play this sport that your grip and forearm strength starts to become super-human :) be careful not to twist the nut so hard that it shears the bolt! (been there, done that). If the bolts extend beyond the nuts they should be sawn off with a hack saw or circular cutting tool so they don't catch on jerseys, players or equipment. Some players even wrap a little hockey tape around this part of the stick. Don't go too crazy with the tape or it will be more difficult to get it off to check the tightness of the nuts.

Keep your picks sharp! Each pair of picks usually has 6 or more points (3 or more for each pick). Only the outside points need to be sharpened. The inside points are there to distribute pressure so, should you stab another player (hopefully accidentally), you are less likely to harm other players (or if your clumsy like me, yourself). Remember, don't sharpen your picks to a point. That's dangerous and against most governing bodies' rules. Sharpen them to an edge. How you do it depends on the material the picks are made of. Mild steel can be sharpened with a small fine file. Several strokes on one side and the a light stroke on the other side to remove the bur. Hardened steel picks are too much for a file. The best way to sharpen them is with a small sanding drum on the end of a rotary (dremel) tool. Only lightly touch the metal otherwise you'll grind away the point in no time! Which type of picks you use are personal preference. Mild steel will require sharpening more often but are generally less expensive. Hardened steel requires less frequent sharpening but is usually more expensive and are more brittle and not impossible to break. Take your pick!

Shafts
Shafts can be made of many materials. Wood is common in one piece and made sticks. Softwood is good for junior or smaller players because they are so light. Hardwood is better suited to larger stronger players. Composite shafts with wooden or composite blades are now common too. These composite shafts are most inexpensively supplied by AB player who have broken their sticks. Stick length is again a personal preference. Longer sticks will give you a longer stroke and if you have good upper body strength will make you faster. Longer sticks are also good for receiving a less than perfect pass. However, when you're trying to dig a puck out of a corner or make a quick shot or pass they require more skill. Shafts don't usually require a lot of maintenance. Wooden shafts may need to be lightly sanded occassionally to prevent splinters and slivers. Painted shafts also reduce this risk. If you're sticks start to wear away somewhere in the middle they are probably rubbing against your bucket (seat). The usual culprit is hardware attaching the straps that hold you in. Cutting of bolts that extend beyond nuts and/or covering the offending area with a little hockey tape usually solves this problem.

Does anyone have any information on the following:
-One piece composite sledge hockey sticks?
-Proper attachment/reattachment of blades to composite hockey stick shafts?
-What the "lie" of a sledge hockey stick is?
-In AB hockey, one can lean on their stick and get it to bend, storing extra energy, before the puck is released. Is anyone doing this in sledge hockey?