A revolutionary new ice hockey stick test machine looks primed and ready to shoot down its competition.
It just needs to be built.
Unsatisfied with the current principal method used to test stick durability, University of Waterloo engineering prof John McPhee set out to design a new system.
Primarily, he wanted to build a machine that would help improve the reliability of one-piece composite hockey sticks.
Since their introduction nearly a decade ago, they have grown rapidly in popularity among professional and amateur hockey players because of their performance boost—greater accuracy and velocity of shot.
McPhee, an avid sports fan, followed the progress of the new sticks and noticed they broke frequently.
“That’s the big problem […] there’s so much stick breakage and we really need [a better] way of testing the sticks,” said McPhee.
Darren Stefanyshyn, a mechanical engineer and associate professor at the University of Calgary was hired on by the NHL to devise solutions that would reduce the amount of one-piece composites shattering apart.
To do this, he used three-point static bending tests on the sticks: a method where a stick is placed horizontally, supported it at both ends, and then slowly pushed down in the middle. However McPhee doesn’t believe this way of testing tells the whole story.
“That’s going to tell you how flexible a stick is. It’s not going to really tell you much about stick breakage,” said McPhee. “Especially when the blade itself was never loaded up. They just loaded the shaft.”
McPhee believes the answer will lie in testing the sticks dynamically. In other words, measuring the effects acting on the stick from the time it makes contact with the ice to when the puck leaves the blade.
Inspired by his work as a technical advisor for Golf Digest magazine, where computer-controlled robots were used to test out new golf clubs and balls, McPhee designed a robot based upon the same idea: a machine that repeats the exact same shot over and over again.
To make this happen, McPhee realized he had to overcome one major design obstacle.
“You need arms to attach to the stick at two different locations,” said McPhee. “Furthermore, the hockey stick has to be able to bend between those two places.”
As golf clubs are held with both hands at the same spot, testers can get away with using a one-armed robot clamping down on the club grip at a single location.
He decided to tackle the problem by working on it with one of his students, Matthew McQueen, who approached McPhee for a fourth-year sports engineering design project.
Initially, they hooked up several sensors to an elite hockey player and had the player take 19 slapshots while tracking the three-dimensional motions of his hands on the shaft.
“[We then] used that data to determine what the plane of motion was for swinging a hockey stick,” said McQueen.
Once finalized, McPhee and McQueen were able to design and build a tabletop prototype for the robot driven by a hand crank from the point where the stick contacts the ice to after it shoots the puck.
McQueen’s successor on the project, Etienne Genoud, also a student of McPhee’s, came up with a new design that incorporates the hockey stick as part of the system, not just an attachment.
“This [design] wouldn’t work if there wasn’t a hockey stick in it,” said McPhee. “You’d have a motor spinning and at the other end, the arm would just be sitting there not moving.”
This design has not yet been assembled, but McPhee says they’re very close. With the help of Genoud, using computer-aided design to finalize the parts and enable a machine shop, they can begin building the components.
As for industry response to McPhee’s latest hockey stick tester design, he says the companies contacted haven’t exactly embraced the new robot.
“They don’t seem to be ready for that yet,” said McPhee. “I just don’t think [hockey is] as sophisticated or technologically advanced an industry yet.”
Howeer, success might be as simple as finding the right customer.
“Maybe the NHL should be the customer […] a lot of marketing success involves a little bit of luck, you know?” said McPhee. “Anyway, we’re going to keep getting the word out there.”
