Can you paint a hockey stick?

Yes. Paint sticks to a composite shaft, and plenty of players have done it. What you can’t do is undo it, and damage from a modification is not covered by our warranty. Painting costs you weight, grip and a weekend. Buying a stick in the color you actually wanted costs you none of the three.

What people actually do

There is a standard recipe for this and we did not invent it. Players scuff the shaft with fine sandpaper so the new finish has something to hold onto. They wipe the dust off, tape off the blade and the butt end, lay down an adhesion primer, then two or three thin coats of spray paint, then a clear coat over the top. Then they wait longer than they want to, because the last coat is not cured when it feels dry.

We have not run that on a Maila shaft and we are not going to tell you it works on one. The paragraph above is what people describe doing, written down so you can see the size of the job before you buy the cans. Everything below is what the job costs you.

It adds weight, and we won’t tell you how much

Primer, color and clear coat are three layers of material over the length of a shaft. That is not nothing.

It is also not a number we have. We have never weighed a painted stick, so we are not publishing a gram figure for it, and neither should anybody who has not put one on a scale. What we can give you is the number you would be moving away from: 385 g Senior, 320 g Intermediate, 260 g Junior. If a few grams matter to you, what a hockey stick weighs is the fuller version of that answer.

Grip is where a paint job usually loses

Your top hand does not care what color the stick is. It cares how the shaft feels through a glove, and that is the thing a clear coat changes.

A clear coat is a smooth surface by design. Expect it to be slicker than whatever was there before, not grippier. Which is why most people who paint a shaft end up taping the top third anyway, and the weekend they spent on that section is now under a wrap nobody will ever see. If you know you are going to tape it, stop the paint at the tape line and save yourself two coats.

The warranty line, in our own words

We would rather quote our own warranty page than summarize it. Under what isn’t covered, it says: “Normal wear, cosmetic scuffs, and damage from misuse or modification. Cutting the shaft too short, adding an extension wrong, or a reflex job gone sideways are on you.”

Painting is a modification. Read that sentence the narrow way it is written: damage that comes from what you did to the stick is yours rather than ours. It is not a trapdoor that deletes the rest of the page.

The practical problem is proof. If a painted shaft breaks, nobody can look at a photo and separate a slash from whatever happened while the shaft was being sanded. So if you are planning to paint a stick and you also want the 30-day replacement to mean something, email hello@supermaila.com before you start and get the answer for your stick in writing. And if the stick came from somebody else, go read their warranty page. We can only speak for what we wrote.

A blade is a worse place to paint than a shaft

The blade is the part that hits things. Pucks, boards, other people’s sticks, the ice. Anything you add to that surface leaves it first, and it leaves in flakes rather than evenly.

There is also the obvious objection. Most players tape the blade, so blade paint spends its whole life under a wrap. Paint the shaft if you are painting anything. And if you are inspecting a stick you already own rather than decorating it, signs a hockey stick is about to break tells you where to look.

Cutting and painting are not the same modification

Both are on the excluded list, but they cost you different things. Cutting changes how the stick plays, permanently and predictably: every inch off the top stiffens the flex. Painting changes how it looks and how it feels in your top hand, and nobody has published a number for either.

If the stick is going to be shortened as well as painted, cut it first. A saw through fresh paint chips the edge you just spent a weekend on. How to cut a hockey stick covers the rest, including what it does to the flex.

What we will not tell you

Two things, on purpose.

We will not name a paint or a primer to use on a Maila shaft. We have not tested one on ours. Recommending a chemistry we have never put on our own product is how a reader ends up sanding a stick on our say-so, and we would rather leave the gap visible than fill it with a guess.

We also will not tell you that painting makes a stick play worse. We have not measured that. What we have said above is that paint weighs something and a clear coat is smooth. How much of either you can feel on the ice is your call, not a number we own.

The cheaper version of this

People paint sticks because nobody sold them the color they wanted. That is more or less why this company exists, so we are not going to pretend to be neutral about it.

Eight colors across three sizes, and black is not one of them.

• Senior: pink, blue, green, orange. 77 flex, 385 g, about 65 inches (165 cm).
• Intermediate: pink, red, yellow, blue. 50 flex, 320 g, about 62 inches (157 cm).
• Junior: light blue, light pink. 20 flex, 260 g, about 58 inches (147 cm).

Color decides nothing about how the stick plays. Size sets the flex, the weight and the length, and every color in a size costs the same. A stick that turns up in your color skips all of it: no sandpaper, no cans, no drying time, and a warranty with nothing to argue about. If you are building the rest of the kit around it, matching your hockey equipment colors picks up there.

Common questions

Can you spray paint a composite hockey stick? Yes, people do it. The usual route is scuff, primer, two or three thin coats, then clear. We have not tested it on ours, so we won’t recommend a product for the job.

Does painting a hockey stick change how it plays? It adds material to the outside of the shaft and it puts a smooth clear coat where your top hand goes. We have not measured the effect and we are not going to invent a number for it.

Does painting void a Maila warranty? Not the whole thing. Our warranty page excludes damage from modification, which means a break caused by what you did is on you. The 30-day replacement and the defect cover are written separately. Email hello@supermaila.com before you start if you want the answer for your stick in writing.

Start at the other end

If color is the reason you were reaching for sandpaper, this is the wrong end of the problem. Get the size and the flex right first with how to choose a hockey stick, or run your height and weight through the size finder and have it settled in about ten seconds. Then go pick a color from the sticks. The longer argument for owning one that isn’t black is in colored hockey sticks.