Topic - Nordic walking: making
your own poles
Date first posted on eCommunity - 12
August 2007
Nordic walking enthusiasts like to tell us that
their sport can be
traced back to the time when top Scandinavian XC racers, wanting to
maintain peak fitness year-round, started to use their ski poles
during summer "dryland" training sessions. However for many of these
enthusiasts this nostalgia for the old ways is limited; and soon
they go on to tell us that XC poles are thoroughly unsuitable for
Nordic walking (NW). What we need instead, they say, are specially
designed NW poles. Anything else will be too heavy, or will have
poor shock-absorption or some other vital ergonomic deficiency.
Well, I've never been sure of that. So a couple of winters ago I
brought home from Norway some old bamboo XC poles, with the
intention of modifying them for NW. And – these things take time – I
have finally gotten round to finishing the job. And the conclusion
is that they work well enough for me.
I bought the poles in a ski hire shop near Lillehammer. The shop-keeper didn't know how much to charge but we settled on 100 kroner
per pair, a bit less than £10 Sterling. (They are therefore possibly
the cheapest things you can buy in Norway.) As NW poles are shorter
than XC ones, I asked if there were any children's sizes, but there
were not. The only sizes available were 150cm or longer, and so I
would need to cut them down to my usual 120cm.
WHAT THE JOB INVOLVED
The poles are the sort that was used widely in Scandinavia until
maybe 20 years ago. The shaft is made from varnished bamboo, with a
diameter of about 16mm. At the top is a white leather handle with a
loop of leather. The leather pieces are fixed to the shaft with a
hefty rivet.
I don't have tools for riveting, so I didn't want to disturb this
top end, just in case I couldn't fit it back together again.
The bottom end looked easier to work with. Here there is an
aluminium ferrule, a sort of sheath about 90mm long, that protects
the bottom of the pole, and that provides an attachment for the
basket and for the spike that is the pole's point of contact with
the ground. I decided to shorten this bottom end.
I wanted to keep the ferrules, but I didn't need the baskets, which
came off easily (just remove a split pin) and which went into my box
of ski spares. Removing the ferrules was tricky. One of them slid
off after a lot of coaxing. On the other pole the ferrule seemed to
have been fixed with glue. Hoping it was hot-melt glue I tried to
soften it in boiling water, but that didn't work. So I had to saw it
off then clamp it in a vice and drill it out.
Shortening the shafts to NW length was a two minute job with a sharp
saw. (The formula for determining correct pole length is your height
multiplied by 0.68.)
There were then two things to do before refitting the ferrules.
One was to take a file to the outside of the bottom of the poles, to
reduce their diameter a little so that they would fit snugly into
the ferrules.
The other was to glue a length of dowelling inside the hollow centre
of each bamboo shaft. These would provide the bases into which the
spikes would be screwed.
Then I refitted the ferrules and glued them in place.
Finally I screwed in the spikes. But (now that the baskets were no
longer there to act as fenders) they seemed dangerously long and
sharp, so I shortened and blunted them with an angle-grinder. (A
hacksaw would have done the job as well, but much more slowly.)
Overall, the project was enjoyable enough, but it was fiddly and
needed more tools (and more time) than I had expected. An
alternative and quicker method would be to cut off and discard the
original ferrules and baskets and simply attach new walking stick
ferrules. You can get them from lots of walking stick specialists,
for example www.thestickman.co.uk. If most of your NW is on hard
surfaces you might choose a rubber ferrule. If you walk mostly on
grass you might instead choose the "Alpine" ferrule, which has a
metal spike.
HOW THE POLES PERFORM
Weight-wise, they are not much heavier than specialised NW poles. On
our kitchen scales they are about 190gm per pole, just a little more
than my Exel Trainers, which are about 170gm.
Performance-wise, they seem fine. The straps don't allow as good a
push-back as the Exel straps, and they are not as comfortable, but
the difference is small. The overall handling is good – which is to
say, once I have walked with them for a few minutes I more or less
forget about them and concentrate on my workout. Shock-absorption
seems okay.
So, if you are up for a bit of DIY, and you fancy the thought of a
cheap and environmentally sound piece of fitness kit, save some room
in your ski bag next time you travel to the snow and get ready to do
some haggling in the ski shop.
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