Your floorball stick is your most important tool to succeed in the rink. Perhaps it’s just plastic and carbon, some screws and a grip. But you should treat her like a lady.
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1. Avoid extreme temperatures
You know what happens when you expose your stick to the heat of a summer day. The blade gets soft, sometimes almost unplayable. And when it freezes, your blade gets too hard and you loose touch. If you cannot avoid extreme temperatures, pack your blade into textiles or use a bag with a thermo layer.
2. Humidity is not a friend
Carry your sticks in a stick bag or in a separate section of your tool bag. If you let them mess with your sweaty shirts or your wet towels, your grip will soak in humidity. In consequence you’ll have to buy a new one earlier than necessary.
3. Don’t spray
There are enough designs to choose from. Don’t spray-paint your shaft. You might cover the IFF certificate or the mark for the lowest hold. In fact, almost every modification of your stick violates IFF rules.
4. Keep your shaft clean
When changing your grip, try to get all the rests off the shaft. Your new grip will not only stick better, it will also feel slicker and perform the way it’s supposed to.
5. Bend the blade with care
To bend your blade, first, heat it up by diving it into boiling water or using a hot air gun. Then take a ball, press it into the blade to form it and cool the plastic down in your freezer. Try to bend only once. The more often you bend the softer your blade gets.
6. Don’t screw it
When changing your blade, use a proper screwdriver. One size too small or one size to big and you will not only get a blister, you’ll also destroy the screw’s head. Sooner or later you won’t be able to screw it at all.
7. Respect the floor
If you have some promo events and you need to play any improper ground such as concrete use some old stick. When playing with your darling, you’ll roughen its blade’s bottom. You can try to brush it off, but you’ll destroy the torsion of your blade anyhow.
8. Keep your creativity for the game
Leave the engineering to the pros. Don’t try to combine blades and shafts that don’t fit together. Sometimes you can connect them by drilling screws into the shaft. But you won’t only loose your warranty claim, it’s not very likely that the shaft and the blade will get along well. Furthermore, combining different brands is simply forbidden.
9. Leave her some space
Try to avoid squeezing too many sticks into one bag. When grips rub each other you can be sure you’ll have to change them very soon. If you have to transport a higher number of sticks, take a bigger bag or cover their grips with your textiles.
10. Hands off broken shafts
A broken full carbon shaft can be a fascinating piece of revealed technology. All these sparkling, silverish layers. Beautiful. Unfortunately it can also be a pretty dangerous bastard. Its sharp edges can cut your skin like a scalpel and all the tiny splinters might not only bore into your hand, but also, due to their very light weight, take off and get inhaled.
11. What’s broken is broken
There are experts who found ways how to fix broken shafts. Some weld, other glue. We understand that a proper floorball stick costs proper money, but the features of a composite or even carbon shaft are too complex to be put back together by you. Your stick will behave differently and might even injure someone – for safety reasons every licensed shaft has predetermined breaking points.