Although weighing a mere 150 pounds, Dye had immensely strong arms and used a stick made of solid hickory. While hockey sticks at the time were commonly made from maple, yellow birch, ironwood, ash or hickory, the latter is by far the strongest and most flexible. It is also far harder than the others, without being exceptionally brittle like ironwood, which is twice as hard as hickory. Dye used this stick and his wrist strength to propel the puck at occasionally dangerous speeds, and his "wicked drives" and shots that goalies "could not see" were mentioned many times in game summaries. His shots were capable of snapping a two-inch thick plank, and Jack Adams recalled seeing several of Dye's drives punch clean through the back-rests of arena seats and even through the 1/8-inch thick wire mesh used as crowd protection at Toronto's Arena Gardens. Opposing defencemen would attempt to knock down long shots made by Dye from centre ice, only to find out in dismay that their sticks had been shattered in two.