The equipment curlers actually own
Curling needs less kit than almost any sport with ice in it. The club owns the stones. What you own is a pair of shoes with mismatched soles, a brush, and clothes that let you crouch.
Last updated 2026-08-16
What you actually need on day one#
Nothing. That is not a slogan — clubs run open sessions with lending brushes, slip-on sliders and the club's own stones, and the honest advice is to turn up and borrow everything until you are sure you are coming back.
Bring: clean, flat-soled shoes that have never been worn outside (grit on a sheet is a pick waiting to happen — see how ice is made), trousers you can get into a full crouch in, and layers. A curling rink is cold at the ice and warm two metres up, and you will be doing bursts of hard physical work in it.
Shoes: the one genuinely odd item#
A curling shoe is two different shoes. One foot slides, the other grips, and they are not interchangeable.
- The sliding shoe has a smooth sole, almost always PTFE, from about 1 mm to 5 mm thick. Thicker and harder means a faster, more stable slide; thinner is slower and easier to control. Beginners want thin.
- The gripping shoe has ordinary rubber. It does the pushing, and it stops you sliding around the rest of the time.
- A gripper is a rubber overshoe you pull on over the slider when you are not throwing, so you can walk. Losing one under the seating is a rite of passage.
- Slip-on sliders — a PTFE plate held on by a strap — turn any flat shoe into a sliding shoe. This is what clubs lend, and it works perfectly well for a season.
The brush#
A modern curling brush is a stiff, light shaft — usually carbon fibre — with a hinged head carrying a replaceable fabric pad. It does three jobs: it sweeps, it is a balance aid during delivery, and it is what the skip holds on the ice to mark the line.
What matters when buying one:
- Stiffness. Sweeping is about downward pressure. A whippy shaft absorbs the force you are trying to put into the ice.
- Weight and length. Light enough to move fast, long enough to sweep without stooping.
- The pad. Consumable. Pads wear out, and a worn pad sweeps worse.
In 2015 several manufacturers released heads with directional fabric — abrasive weaves that let a single sweeper steer a stone far more than sweeping had ever been able to. The effect was large enough to break the sport's balance, top teams publicly refused to use them, and the World Curling Federation ended up standardising the fabric outright. Competition brush heads have been on an approved-fabric list ever since. It is the closest curling has come to an equipment scandal, and it is universally called broomgate.
The stones#
You do not own these; the club does. A set is sixteen stones and represents a serious capital asset, which is why they are looked after so carefully and why nobody stands one on its side.
| Property | Value | Why it is that |
|---|---|---|
| Mass | 19 kg (about 42 lb) | Regulation allows 17.24–19.96 kg including handle. |
| Diameter | 28.4 cm | Maximum circumference is 91.44 cm. |
| Height | 11.45 cm | Minimum 11.43 cm. |
| Running band | about 13 cm across | The only part touching the ice. Narrow contact is what makes the stone run and curl. |
| Moment of inertia | 0.385 × M R² | Not the 0.5 of a uniform disc — the mass sits low and inward, and there is a bolt through the middle. |
| Restitution | 0.94 | Measured. A collision loses about 6% of the kinetic energy. |
Where the granite comes from#
Almost every serious curling stone in the world is cut from one of two sources. Ailsa Craig is a small volcanic island off the west coast of Scotland, and it yields two useful granites: blue hone, dense and nearly non-porous, and common green. The other source is Trefor in north Wales.
Porosity is the whole reason for the fuss. Water that soaks into the running surface and then freezes will split the stone apart from the inside over a few seasons, so the part that touches the ice is usually an insert of the hardest, least absorbent granite available, fitted into a body of something cheaper.
Ailsa Craig is a bird sanctuary, and quarrying is now tightly restricted to occasional harvests of loose rock rather than blasting. The world's supply of new curling stones is, in a real sense, finite.
Handles, and the ones with electronics in them#
The handle bolts through the centre of the stone. In competition, handles are colour-coded per team, and top-level events use sensor handles — usually called eye on the hog — with a capacitive sensor in the grip and lights in the handle. If the thrower's hand is still on the stone as it crosses the near hog line, the lights go red and the stone is removed. It takes an unenforceable judgement call out of the officials' hands entirely.
The rest of it#
- A stabiliser — a small handle or frame held in the free hand during delivery for balance, instead of the brush. Common, and completely legitimate.
- A delivery stick — a pole that clips over the handle so the stone can be pushed from a standing position, with no crouch and no slide. Stick curling is a real discipline with its own leagues, and it keeps a lot of people in the sport who would otherwise have had to leave it.
- A stopwatch — usually a small one clipped where a thumb can reach it. Splits are how teams read the ice: see ice speed.
- Gloves — grip for sweeping and warmth for standing about. Sweeping gloves have reinforced palms.
- Trousers — the one clothing item worth buying properly. Curling trousers stretch enough for a full lunge and are usually windproof at the front.
- Knee pads — for anyone who wants to be curling in twenty years.
What to buy, in order#
- Shoes. The single biggest improvement available to a beginner, because a stable slide is the foundation of everything and a borrowed slip-on slider is never quite right.
- A brush. Your own head, kept clean, sweeping the way you expect.
- Trousers. Purely a comfort purchase, and worth it.
- Everything else. Slowly, and only when you know what you are missing.
None of it is what makes you better. Draw weight is what makes you better, and it is free.