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Hiking Stick |
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Kingfisher WoodWorks LLC |
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| The Kingfisher 56" hiking stick is a slender unassuming straight staff of uncompromising quality, strength and versatility. These superior staffs are light weight, fast and extremely versatile for many situations. Kingfisher WoodWorks, an American company with roots in the manufacture of wooden martial art practice equipment offers these specially designed staffs to hikers and walkers seeking a fast, rugged hiking and trekking pole without gimmicks, questionable technologies and un ecological materials. These products were developed over a 21 year period for the most demanding conditions encountered by martial artists and then adapted as a natural extension to hikers looking for simplicity and reliability. |
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Advantages of the Wooden Hiking Stick |
| Efficiency |
The use of hiking sticks when walking long distances distributes weight to the arms, thus increasing endurance. They improve balance in rough terrain and when crossing rivers and streams. Transferring pressure lowers stress on the joints, knees, hips and lower back. They allow a more upright, hiking posture which in turn makes breathing more efficient. They help with steep inclines and help maintain balance on declines. Constant use of the arms in handling a pole reduces swelling in the hands and fingers through active engagement of the upper body and extremities.
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| Low Tech but Precise, Accurate shape with Unmatched Strength |
| Most trekking poles today are "high tech" in design with adjustable telescopic features and are made from materials such as aluminum or titanium. They feature adjustable wrist lanyards and can have plastic or cork handgrips. Alternatively, The Kingfisher hiking stick is a simple, straight, handcrafted Appalachian Hickory staff from a well managed domestic source. It has superb strength - much more strength than a modern metal trekking pole. At 22 oz. weight, it is not heavy but offers the hiker a feeling of compete confidence that the staff will bear up to any unusual situation that might arise. |
| Benefit in Dynamic Situations and Trail Running |
| A simple, straight cylindrical staff of high quality wood is ergonomically superior and faster than a hiking stick of metal or irregularly shaped wood. The hiker places his or her hand exactly at the preferred height. Since there is no predetermined grip position the working length is instantly determined intuitively. These sticks are ideal for general hiking and walking but also indispensable for trail running. The stick can be quickly shifted from one hand to the other as an aid to balance, especially when vaulting logs, blow downs and other obstacles |
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| Kingfisher Standard Hiking Stick Features |
Made of Tough Appalachian Hickory
| All Kingfisher Hiking sticks are made of air dried Appalachian Hickory. The standard hiking stick is made of high quality Grade L5 hickory wood, accurately shaped, sanded to a smooth finish and hand rubbed with teak oil. This is followed by 3 protective coats of high grade marine finish. |
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| Ultra Hard but Eco-Friendly Carbide Tip |
All Kingfisher Hiking Sticks are equipped with a rugged, tungsten carbide tip to take abrasion and impact. This carbide point is engineered with a broad, rounded profile for unmatched durability.This point is not sharp or edged, like that of modern telescoping poles. It will do much less damage to fragile environments and will have less tendency to leave ugly pock marks in rock formations that make up so many wilderness trails.
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| Uniform Length and Diameter |
| As mentioned above, there are several key advantages to straightness and uniformity in the shape of a hiking stick. Since it is most often used to aid balance and to counter uneven terrain, its symmetry and familiarity to the hiker's hand are extremely helpful for quick reaction. For more on dimensions, see this link: Hiking Stick Length & Diameter. |
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| Kingfisher Hiking Stick Options: |
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Optional Premium Upgrade: Premium upgrade hiking sticks are crafted of L6 grade hickory and rather than being sanded, are cut entirely by hand before receiving its teak oil and weatherproof finish. Careful inspection reveals hundreds, if not thousands, of small individual cuts that create the finished surface. Because of this, the hand cut hiking stick has a chiseled, clean geometry not rounded off by the use of sanding and abrasives. These hiking staffs have a precise but subtly archaic surface. The feeling in the hand is a more direct connection to the wood. See this link for information on the traditional manufacture of wooden sticks, staffs and wooden swords without the use of sandpaper. About Kingfisher WoodWorks. |
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Optional Hand Lanyard |
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| The Kingfisher Hiking Stick is available with an optional fully adjustable soft perlon hand lanyard. The lanyard is not mechanically fastened to the wood but instead wound on the shaft in such a way that allows for a quick sliding action along the staff. It can be easily adjusted to any height but will not slip when the lanyard loop is stressed during hiking action. The lanyard, in other words, can be positioned high or low on the stick instantaneously for different hiking conditions or personal preference while giving the hiker the full support of a fixed wrist lanyard. |
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Optional Calligraphy: |
| Our hiking staffs are based on a long lineage of martial art wooden weapons. Kingfisher offers calligraphy in Kanji. The character to the right reads "Do". It means the way or path to enlightenment. Kingfisher offers hundreds of ideas on personalized inscriptions so when you are ready to order, click this link "Order a Hiking Stick" and follow the instructions on the secure ordering page. |
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| The Kingfisher Hiking Stick Notes: Writings on the Origins of the Kingfisher Hiking Stick and the Ecology of its Use. |
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| An Old World Product in Modern Times - |
| With many high quality products, designs that look the most simple actually require much more effort to produce than more complex engineered ones. With regards to hiking and walking sticks for example, a modern aluminum trekking pole is VERY EASILY developed. All of the technology is currently accessible and the parts are easily fabricated and outsourced from stock aluminum tube alloys and synthetic materials. Really, all that is required for an American distributor to introduce a new sporting goods product is the effort of producing a drawing and forwarding that to a Chinese manufacturer. These outsourced products are developed for ease of manufacture and maximum profit. Our entire economy is filled with products so conceived. This hiking stick is different. It's made with an old world mentality. Although it looks exceedingly simple, the Kingfisher wooden hiking stick required a serious effort to develop and requires specialized skills to make. As with our other products, the parameters of its use dictated its design - ease of manufacture and availability of raw materials did not. |
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| The Right Materials - |
| First of all, we are woodworkers and not particularly interested in synthetic materials or metal products but consider, for example, a wooden hiking stick: how easy it would be to buy ash, birch, oak or cherry dowels and sell them as hiking sticks! All of these hardwoods are readily available, inexpensive and easy to finish. However, while there are innumerable North American Hardwoods excellent for furniture and casework, they are all far inferior to Appalachian Hickory when subjected to dynamic stresses and none of the lumber yard hardwoods have the handsome ruggedness and feeling of presence as hickory. In pre-industrial times, before the emergence of synthetic materials, hickory was always selected for tool handles, staves, wagon spokes etc. As the demand for those products based on archaic technologies waned, mills specializing in hickory also slowly disappeared. Today, only a few remain and most of their yield is shipped outside of the United States. After exhaustive search (by the mid 1990's we had been making martial art products for at least 10 years) we found a few reliable family owned mills in the Central Atlantic areas of Tennessee and Kentucky willing to cut and dry billets of premium Shagbark Hickory for staffs. Now we use this largely unobtainable wood, unequivocally the toughest American hardwood, for most of our standard products. |
| Sustainability- |
Appalachian Hickory is an indigenous hardwood comparatively well managed by a handful of predominantly family owned businesses. The wood comes from a special area in the Central Appalachians and no other. I'd have to say, however, that its very character of the tree itself that protects if from overuse rather than the efforts of environmental management. The very properties of Appalachian Hickory that make it ideal for staffs, sticks and staves make it less desirable for general construction, woodworking, cabinet making, flooring etc. and this fact inadvertently helps protect the tree from overuse. Hickory, while beautiful, is extremely difficult to work, difficult to dry and difficult to harvest as it grows in difficult terrain. There are dozens of other species that are more forgiving and economical. Years ago, hickory was prized for it's singular mechanical strength but as technologies and synthetic materials developed, the demand for wooden spokes, wooden tool handles, wooden machine parts, wooden sports handle shafts, wooden skis etc. diminished. Next time you visit your local hardwood dealer, check to see if they carry any Appalachian Hickory. Chances are, they won't even know what you're talking about. They may have a little local hickory, some pecan perhaps but they certainly won't carry any air dried Appalachian Hickory from eastern Tennessee or Kentucky. A knowledgeable lumber dealer might wonder why would you kill yourself making a table or cabinet out of that intractable wood when there are so many others to choose from. Appalachian Hickory isn't appropriate for general purposes and indeed, more board footage of the lumber grows each year than is harvested.
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The Shagbark Hickory tree.
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Appalachian Hickory grows on sloped inaccessible terrain |
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| The unusual technical demand placed on the hiking stick does, in another surprising way, relate to the circumstances that conserve this tree. It involves the strength of wood in a ring porous hardwood and the fact that, in this case, second growth wood is more desirable than first growth- the information is rather counter intuitive so hang tight. |
In the diagram at right, consider the cross section of a ring porous North American hardwood tree. The microscopic view shows the annual growth rings which are really pores or tubes that transport water to the leaves. Each band of pores represents the new growth that occurs in the springtime (earlywood). The band of dense solid wood develops later in the summer (latewood). The earlywood growth, having many "open tubes", are weaknesses in the wood from a mechanical standpoint. Trees have a tendency to lay down a roughly equal band of earlywood each year. The dense, strong latewood however is dependent upon growing conditions later in the summer. Trees that grow quickly and vibrantly under favorable conditions (eg areas of fast second growth forest) produce more latewood as a proportion to earlywood and yield denser, stronger wood. Most people are indoctrinated with the concept that old growth wood is vastly superior to new growth, and this may be true for some species but as much as you might want to believe otherwise the following statement is fact: In a ring porous hardwood fast, new growth is preferable in strength, smoothness and appearance to slow old growth. Note - this characteristic does not apply to softwoods or diffuse porous woods so be careful how you throw this information around.
So, where is this all headed? - Well, the few family mills and specialty loggers that harvest Appalachian Hickory for use in this micro industry, prefer new growth, not old growth. It is this preference that helps to protect the older forests. While a hiking stick of indiginous wood is vastly superior in an ecological sense to one of tropical origin or synthetic materials, Appalachian hickory cannot really be surpassed from among the North American hardwoods from an ethical standpoint. |
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| Shaping of the Hiking Stick - |
| A dowel - easy right? Sure it's easy to make a cheap dowel. There are standard process dowel making machines that will cut a 1 inch wooden dowel in seconds but this process will yield a crooked rod of uneven diameter. Moreover our wood of choice, Appalachian Hickory is a premium air dried hardwood that needs to be handled with finesse in order to arrive at its chosen 15/16" diameter. Instead of using brute high speed dowel milling, we carefully turn the raw billets on cnc lathes to maintain straightness and uniformity. These blanks are then |
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©2007 kingfisherwoodworks.com |
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