I have been asked to visit a client near Northampton .
I was recommended to this client from one of my regular clients in the same area .
The main problem was this badly cracked bolt hole , a bolt lug had been forced and spun around inside the slate and shattered this bolt hole .
not a lot we could do with this , if I had tried to mess with it we could have made it much worse , so in this scenario it was better to leave the bolt out of the table .
the cushions where made from very heavy Cuban Mahogany and weighed as much as steel cushions so the bounce would not be affected by leaving one bolt out of the cushion .
the hairline crack had also spread above the slate bed along the dotted lines and the first slate joint was raised slightly , this could be frost damage if the slate was stored outside in winter .
My solution to the raised joint was not to mess with the cracked slate or disturb it , just in case it just fell apart , and made matters worse
The joint that was bad could be felt when ironing the table , so I filled all slate joints and feathered this joint in with soft sand car body filler , result is no bad joint anymore .
now one other problem that is is very noticable on old burroughs and watts tables is the centre pocket bounce back of ball back onto the table ,
after hitting the pocket plate leather , this is because there is very little distance between the bolted cushion pocket plate and the slate fall .
and is a very common problem on old B&W tables that a lot of people have an issue with .
on this table the slate fall did not align to the nose of the cushion so I was able to add a further 1/8th of slate fall into the table by rasping the slate away , on this table all 4 corners had already been done like this , but they did not touch the middle slate falls , now the owner has a bit more distance to the pocket plate .
note that this slate also has an airline crack in it , I have filled it with isopan car body filler soft sand type , just in case it could show through the cloth .
I think at some point the table slates has had some rough handling or maybe frost damage if slate was wet and stored outside . frost gets into slight hairline cracks and freezes resulting in expanding and making the crack worse .
But all is ok now .
cushions where made from a very heavy Cuban Mahogany , very rare to find this and a costly improvement from standard mahogany when new .
they will bounce as good as Steel cushions , they are that heavy .
A previous fitter had fitted Barton White rubber to this table in the past , I would have used northern Rubber myself .
but the ball bounce was very good from them , so they are OK .
The Finished table , Re-cloth in Strachan 6811 tournament 30 oz , my client had a Hainsworth match cloth fitted on it last time , but he was not happy with it , the fibers of the cloth was shedding and the white balls was covered in fibres .
The lighting shade is due to be replaced for twin tube high frequency white light units , but these old metal shades where the rolls royce of billiard shades back in the day .
The Hartley Engineering metal shade , to the exact requirements of Joe Davies spec .
not many of these around anymore as they often get scrapped for modern lighting .
Modern lighting is the way to go , the game is so much better with white light high frequency tube lights or LED lighting panels .
and I got excellent recommendation from this client , thank you Dave
Yes Geoff arrived 10:30 and was still working at 5 o’clock no 2 hour quickly with this man, all the table problems sorted in a very high professional high standard workmanship to match. I was over the moon with the finished job, most highly recommended
