What material is a hockey puck made of?

A standard ice hockey puck is made of vulcanized rubber.

The puck is a hard, black disk designed to slide across ice while surviving high-speed shots and repeated impacts from sticks and boards. A regulation puck is about 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) in diameter, 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) thick, and weighs roughly 5.5 to 6 ounces. Manufacturers combine natural rubber with bonding materials, antioxidants, and other chemicals to achieve the required hardness and resilience.

Early hockey pucks were not always made this way. Nineteenth-century players used materials including wood, and the first organized games used puck-like objects made from cut-down balls. Rubber gradually became the standard because it produced a durable, consistent disk that stayed relatively flat on the ice.

Pucks are commonly frozen before games to reduce bouncing. They are not made from steel, despite the force of a slap shot, and plastic training pucks are different from the regulation vulcanized-rubber puck used in ice hockey.