03/07/2026
Why Flex Matters
One of the first changes I made when I went into production wasn't something players could see at all, it was the adhesive holding the laminations together.
When people think about a caman, they tend to think about the timber, the shape or the finish.
Very few ever think about the glue.
Yet the adhesive holding the laminations together is one of the most important components in the entire stick.
Previously, the adhesives used in caman making created an extremely strong and rigid bond between the laminations. On paper that sounds like a good thing, but in practice it meant the stick wasn't able to move naturally with the timber during heavy impacts.
Instead of flexing with the wood, the caman was effectively fighting against it.
The result was that when enough force was applied, the energy had nowhere to go and the stick could fail suddenly rather than bending and recovering.
The adhesive I use today contains a greater rubber content, giving it more elasticity and allowing the hickory laminations to work together rather than against one another.
Under load, the shaft is able to flex and absorb energy before returning to its original shape once the strike is complete.
Anyone who has watched a powerful hit in slow motion will have seen this happening without even realising it. The shaft bends, stores energy and then releases it back into the strike before straightening again.
That flex is not a weakness.
It is part of what makes a wooden caman work.
American hickory has long been valued for exactly these properties. Its combination of strength, toughness and shock resistance makes it ideal for applications where repeated impacts are expected.
The glue and the timber therefore don't work independently of one another, they work as a system.
The timber provides the strength and resilience, while the adhesive allows the laminations to move together and share the loads being placed upon them.
It has been suggested over the years that materials such as carbon fibre or even aluminium could provide an alternative to wood for shinty sticks.
From a purely engineering perspective, these materials can be stronger and significantly stiffer than hickory.
But shinty is not baseball, golf or tennis.
Shinty is a full contact sport where stick to stick and stick to body impacts are part of the game.
At some point in any collision, something has to give.
Personally, I would rather that was the stick than the player.
A player can go back to work on Monday with a broken caman.
He cannot go back with a broken leg.
Composite materials have been trialled in hurling in the past, but concerns around how these much stiffer materials behaved in contact situations meant traditional ash construction remained the preferred option.
Carbon fibre composites are typically around 5-10 times stiffer and 4-10 times stronger than hickory in pure mechanical tests, although they achieve this at roughly twice the density and behave very differently under impact loading.
However, materials do not just differ in strength, they differ in how they fail.
Hickory tends to progressively crush, split or delaminate, often giving warning and retaining some integrity. In many cases, minor damage can even be repaired and the stick returned to service.
Carbon fibre composites often remain intact until the fibres or resin fail, after which failure can be sudden and catastrophic depending on the laminate design.
Strength alone is not always the answer.
The real question is:
How strong should it be before strength starts working against the player rather than for them?
That, perhaps, is why hickory and a carefully designed laminate construction still remain such a good fit for our game today.
