50 Things to Make with a Broken Hockey Stick

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

With all of the synthetic materials now being used in the making of
hockey sticks, Manchester may have difficulty in securing sufficient raw
materials to produce future editions of this somewhat tongue-in-cheek
“craft” book. However, to this point, he has come up with 50 more
creative ways to use a broken hockey stick than simply poking it into
the ground as the support for staking tomato plants.

Under Manchester’s guidance, trash becomes the stuff of craft
projects, with most of the final products being functional, some
decorative, and a few—like the Pasta Dryer, the Remote TV Channel
Changer, and the Kayak Hockey Stick—just silly. Each project is
treated in one or two pages, and readers who are not naturally of the
Tim/Tammy-the-Tool persuasion may be intimidated by Manchester’s
eschewing the usual illustrated step-by-step instructions and lists of
needed tools/materials found in most how-to-do-it books. Instead, he
utilizes a breezy conversational writing style in providing his building
instructions while offering his own black-and-white sketches of what the
finished products might look like, with the very occasional
more-detailed drawing of some challenging aspect of a project being
provided. The book should not be dismissed as simply something to give
someone with too much time on his or her hands, as both kids and adults
can have fun making and using many of the projects, such as the
Catapult, Ice Sail, Luge, Water Balloon Launcher, Geodesic Dome, or Ice
Croquet Set. Leaders of youth groups should also mine the book’s
contents for recycling projects.