The problem with the people that work on pool tables in this industry is that most all of them are self-taught, or learned from someone else that was self-taught. There's no schools, books or anything written that are even remotely close to being right, so...where does a table mechanic learn to become a table mechanic? Through trial and error is where 99.9% of them learn, the difference is the table mechanic that sits back and looks at the job he did, and asks himself...could I have done that better, and if he answers yes, then he looks to improve on this or that, and after every job he does, he always asks himself that same question...until one day he finally runs out of answers, and that's where I come in, to talk him to another level that he never knew existed, and that is only through demonstration, the learning process still falls upon him to absorb in what he was just shown, or it'll go right over his head. If the latter happens, I'll show him again, and explain what I did in 3 or 4 different ways in the hopes that one of the ways will click and he then understands, but it's still up to him to use his new found skills...and there lies the problem. It's like speaking a new language, if you don't keep remembering what the words are and what they mean, sooner or later you may start to forget the meanings.
So, there's a lot that I look for in a table mechanic before I'll agree to teaching someone a new level of working on pool tables. And trust me when I say you can't turn to the manufactures for this kind of teaching either, as they deal mostly in new tables, which don't have the same problems that older tables have from everyone already working on them in the past. And sometimes even the table manufactures have it wrong right from the start, you can believe that too
As Mark Gregory would say, it's the job of a real table mechanic to fix, repair, modify, replace or redesign what the last table mechanic did, or the factory who built the table, but it's not our job to build the table in the first place!
Glen
