I have just visited Ian near Wolverhampton .
Ian contacted me to set up his 9ft American pool table in his very well built extension .
He had custom lighting and all top quality materials for the re-rubber and cover .
plus a very expensive lighting unit .
I arrived and with Ian’s help quickly assembled the under frame work and legs plus placed the slate on the frame and the rough leveling .
I then started to strip down the cushions for the re-rubber , and clean the blocks up of old glue ready for the new rubber to be attached .
this is where I first encountered my first problem , the new rubber which was match play standard did not align up with the half round molding on the block work .
Some fitters would have walked away at this stage , or refitted the old rubber back on !
A 10 minute think and the solution was to plane the half round molding off the block work and make some half round molding and fasten on in the correct place to suit the new rubber profile .
so a quick trip to B&Q we found some dowel we could plane down to use as the half round molding .
This set us back a couple of hours but you take the rough with the smooth as they say in this line of work .
once I had re-rubbered the cushions , formed the angles and covered the cushions , we started back on the slate bed for the fine leveling and filling of slate joints to make smooth .
cloth is now laid on ready to staple and stretch down
Stretching to the cloths full amount of possible stretch is a must for a tight cloth , here the center pocket falls are formed .
you cannot have any wrinkles around the fall areas .
Stretching these american cloths onto such large pocket falls is much harder than stretching wool napped cloth on a full size snooker table .
Quality cloth is a must and I recommend either this Simonis 860 or Strachan Super Pro speed or even Hainsworth Elite Pro speed cloth , these three cloths seem to form better around the falls .
one cloth you should be very wary of is the Euro pool brand , it is like stretching cardboard on , it will put blisters on your knuckles stretching that thick euro pool cloth on .
for around £20 to £40 saving from the quality brands , it just is not worth fitting these thick cardboard type cloths on , and I refuse all jobs that would have me fit it .
You often see this cloth in Bowling alley pool tables , it marks easy and looks a mess within weeks , you may have noticed the white burn ball skid acceleration marks appearing on them .
A wool mix cloth is far better than a high percentage of man made fiber one .
the cloth fully stretched out and stapled down , and skirts in place to cover pocket staples
you may notice some damp patches around the pocket areas ,this is spray on starch , these will dry out , a trick that most American pool table fitters now use , I also spray the entire bed cloth with starch and even iron the bed cloth after fitting , this to prevent slackening off of cloth over the future months , a common problem with speed cloths .
The cloth of choice was Iwan Simonis 860 .
Aligning the cushions up using the 6ft straight edge , it is important especially for shots to go down the side cushions to not be deflected out by none alignment of side cushions , these must be kept parallel to each other with NO V shape in or out and both nose’s of rubber in alignment .
the finished table .
a few practice shots to make sure our client Ian is happy with the table .
Ian plays a 8 ball game is the shape of a diamond racking
nice new shiny Aramith pro balls
this is a very expensive triangle that Ian had shipped over from the USA
Ian also arranged to have a very expensive light fitting unit above the table shipped over from the USA .
I must say this is the first time I have ever seen one of these , it looks very nice .
the table Ian had installed is a Longoni manufacture and is a copy of the USA made Brunswick Gold Crown as seen at Butlins in Skegness in above photo .
I will say this , the Longoni is a better built table using better materials than the Brunswick that I have worked on .
but to be fair these Butlins tables have taken some hammer over the many years they have been constantly played on .
