Spring forces around the ice rink –

- There are some spring forces around the rink that play a major role in the game of hockey. One of the ones that you see most often is in the hockey stick. The basic purpose of the hockey stick is to bend and flex when the player moves the puck or shoots the puck. Hockey sticks have different “flexes”. These flexes range from 55 to 75 for younger athletes and from 85 to 100 for older and professional hockey players. 100 flex requires 444 Newtons to flex one inch. The picture to the right is Brett Hull, his father Bobby Hull had the fastest slap shot ever, and it was clocked at 120 miles per hour. As you can see Brett is bending the stick quite a bit. This type of spring creates energy which is then transferred into the hockey puck.

- There are spring forces in the boards that allow some of the energy to be transferred into the boards rather than exerted all into the hockey player. This is to make sure that hockey players have a safe environment to play in. When you think about people skating and as explained before about their kinetic energy, think of that energy being transferred into the boards. The boards have to give way to an immense amount of energy so as not to hurt anyone. Especially when a person with larger mass collides with someone with less mass and then they both collide in to the boards. Here is a video to give you an idea of how the boards flex and take some of the energy away from a massive hit,