How Hockey Equipment is Tested

in order to ensure safety and the best
game they can the manufacturers of
hockey equipment put their gear through
rigorous tests hi I’m Rebecca Brayton
and welcome to watchmojo.com and today
we’re learning how hockey equipment is
tested from the folks at Reebok CCM so
what is involved in the hockey equipment
testing process in hockey equipment
testing what we try to do is understand
how the equipment works out absorbs
force how it generates the energy that
goes into puck let’s say basically is
trying to understand the variables that
affect performance now I think I read
that there are both human testers and
robot testers the portion is with
equipment in the lab where we try to
control all the variables and manipulate
only the one that we try to study and
then we also will have real players
through field testing to understand what
we do with equipment works in the real
world how would you say that this whole
testing process affects the players game
in the long run well the whole thing is
to improve the the protection or the
impact performance we will look at the
variables that play a role in that
equation and we will manipulate them to
get them to the optimal level it’s
always an ongoing process that we try to
figure out things and understand how our
equipment work would you mind showing us
some of the robot testers absolutely
with this particular equipment what
we’re trying to do is evaluate how much
force and at what displacement the stick
will break it tries to mimic the force
that is being applied when you’re
actually taking a shot and flexing the
stick that jig is actually your hand
putting the force through the shaft and
trying to bend the stick to load the
puck so basically what we’ve managed
over here is the displacement and the
force at the point of breakage so if we
want to increase that stiffness or make
it more resistant to breakage we will
play with the construction to achieve
that result this next text is basically
a drop test impact where we will try to
understand how our protective equipment
mostly is absorbing the impact and
protecting the wearer this is part of a
standard that actually we have to meet
in order to place our product in the
market we measure the deceleration when
the protective equipment hits the anvil
which is basically mimicking the flat
surface that you might impact in the
real game this is a piece of equipment
is a cannon what it does it shoots a
puck at the velocity you want this of
course mimics what happens a lot in the
game of hockey there’s many things that
we can evaluate using this particular
test we can look at how forces being
absorbed when you’re hit by a puck or we
can also see how the materials break or
wear after impact there’s a laser beam
that pinpoints the exact location of
that impact in particular what we are
trying to test here is a goalie facemask
as you can see the head form has
plasticine on so that we can get an
imprint in case there is contact this is
basically a pass/fail if there’s no
contact that would be a pass thanks so
much for showing us the equipment no
problem at all thank you