Monthly Archives: July 2015

Today I returned a set of cushions that I had spliced a bit of wood on one cushion end to repair a large piece that had come out from a previous re-cover by another firm and a large tack that forced it out .
This was a table that had seen some serious play over the years in an Army Officers mess .
The Oak orme and sons table had splintery wood that was really bad .
So after splicing in the new bit of oak , I decided to help them out by giving the cushion capping three coats of varnish FREE of charge while I had them in my workshop  , I would have had to touch up the new spliced bit of oak so decided to give all the cushions three coats to seal in the flaking oak wood work and stop splinters getting into trousers when rubbed on the side of the table.
Now the Finnish is not top class because if they required a total re-polish of the cushions it would have cost them around £300 extra so free is free and I am sure they appreciated the gesture of three coats of ronseal satin-coat varnish
I just Dark oak stained and used wire wool to fine sand the varnish between coats , the grain was very coarse and it did the trick and sealed in the woodwork.

the square spliced bit of oak inlaid into the top capping of the end cushion, the previous fitter had used a large tack to tack the cloth to the end of this capping and had split the wood , I use very fine staples which do not damage the woodwork

this officers mess has two tables , the second one also requires a re-cover which I hope to get the work for later on if they like the work that I did to this table.

although I was working to a tight budget for this table , I managed to squeeze into the work a new set of leathers
The varnished wood is not my usual top quality re-polish but I only did this to seal the wood in and help them out , I had other work on so three quick coats of ronseal satin coat was all the time I could give to this job for FREE.

all set up level and ready for play

I have had to replace one cloth due to it being ripped and now another in the space of just a few days of the opening of this local club.
I did not carry out the re-covering of any of the tables in this establishment , but I have found two reasons why these cloths are very easy to rip while playing snooker
first reason , the tables where re-covered around 12 months ago way before the club actually re-opened, so are due for a re-stretch of bed cloth , the table cloths will slacken off over a 12 month time period and are due to be stretched .
but the other reason is more alarming in that the fitter who carried out the re-covering of these tables have not put enough tacks in ,
the spacing down the side of the tables are 10 to 12 inch apart which is shocking work and would cause the cloth to be slack from the first few days as the cloth will have not have enough tack down places to make sure the cloth stays tight ,
I am not going to name names of which firm carried out the re-covering 12 months ago , but here are a few photo’s of why the table cloths are slack and ripping easy from cue stabbing.

A photo taken from under the table , we found only a few tacks on the side of the cloth and these where spaced out 10 to 12 inch apart , the cloth would become very slack between these tacks

As can be seen I did this to every table and found the cloth to be alarmingly very slack to the touch , so much that if you rub your fingers down the cloth it rucks up in front of them as pictured in the photo.

This photo of one of the re-placed cloths , showing my tacks are anchoring the cloth down every 5 inch at least , in this case every 4 inch .

this is what will happen if a cloth is not tight enough , I know this can happen even on very tight cloths but it is very rare , tight cloths tend to just result in a cue stab
Slack cloths almost always end up with a L shape rip like this one
I am sorry to say for this club Manager who has successfully ran another club and also played snooker for many years , that the clubs tables are in need of every table cloth re-stretching ASAP
Without the table bed cloths being tightened back up due to not fitting tight enough by putting enough tacks in and also the time scale of re-cover to opening the club of 12 months , these snooker table’s are going to all end up with torn bed cloths.