AUGUSTA – As hundreds of bills have streamed through the State House during the last few months, at least nine wooden gavels have splintered when slammed down to pronounce votes.

On Tuesday, University of Maine ingenuity came to the rescue to end all the breakage.

UMaine officials presented a space-age gavel fashioned from laminates applied to native beech and maple veneers. The gavel is tapered out near the head to absorb stress, and is covered with a charcoal-colored carbon-fiber material.

The material is so tough it’s being used in bridge designs around the state and to build a pier in Milbridge, said professor Habib Joseph Dagher, director of UMaine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Laboratory.

“It has the same strength as concrete,” Dagher said proudly after a composite gavel was presented to Senate President Michael Michaud and President Pro Tem Richard Bennett, R-Norway.

In the House of Representatives, Speaker Michael Saxl looked up with a grin and approving nod after giving the new gavel an inaugural “thwack!”

Unlike Michaud, a Democrat from East Millinocket, who admits to no broken no gavels this session, Saxl has broken nine, two of which could be repaired. On the day the Portland Democrat shattered three, House Clerk Millicent MacFarland put on a hard hat to shield herself from the wooden debris.

That helped to prompt Rep. Shirley Richard to act. Richard, D-Madison and House chairman of the Education Committee, contacted UMaine to ask for a technically advanced hammer for her presiding officer.

“So we went right to the source,” university President Peter Hoff said. “We turned our attention to the gavel challenge.”

With the session winding down, Dagher found time was short to complete the project. “We had less than two weeks to do this,” Dagher said.

Smashed gavels are nothing new in the State House. During his tenure as speaker from 1975 to 1994, then-Rep. John Martin, now a senator, doomed numerous gavels. House Clerk Emeritus Joseph Mayo recalled pieces of a dozen gavels showering down over his head during his decade as clerk.

Dagher sees much bigger challenges for his composites than replacing legislative gavels. Construction of disaster-resistant housing could avoid damage amounting to tens of billions of dollars a year, he said.