I just finished refinishing the rosewood rails on my Centennial table. A previous owner of the table got the brilliant idea of cutting into the beautiful wood rails to insert score keepers. He put in Gold Crown score keepers and not the after market score keepers that were available for this table.
I had many suggestions as to how to fix this problem before deciding to take out those horrible score keepers and fill the holes with a wooden inlay. I enlisted the services of Kent Davis of KD Cues to do the job. What better person to do this other than one that does inlays for a living. The inlay is so perfect that you can close your eyes and run your fingers over the inlay and never know it's there.
The inlay is framed with a rim of brushed stainless steel and a small plate engraved with the name Centennial.
In doing this project I decided to redo all the rails to match. Having seen pictures of a Centennial refinished by the restoration genius Mark Gregory I figured I would give it a try and do them myself. Amazing what you can learn from the internet. I sanded them all down to remove all the previous finish and darkened them to my liking and put on a few coats of clear finish. After letting that finish get hard I sanded them with very fine wet/dry sand paper and soap and water. Finished them up with extra fine pumice polishing powder. The rails came out better than I had hoped for. The finish is beautiful. Now I'm just waiting for my table mechanic Ernesto Dominguez to come and recover the table. Last step is to polish the metal.
Here are a few pictures of before and after.
I had many suggestions as to how to fix this problem before deciding to take out those horrible score keepers and fill the holes with a wooden inlay. I enlisted the services of Kent Davis of KD Cues to do the job. What better person to do this other than one that does inlays for a living. The inlay is so perfect that you can close your eyes and run your fingers over the inlay and never know it's there.
The inlay is framed with a rim of brushed stainless steel and a small plate engraved with the name Centennial.
In doing this project I decided to redo all the rails to match. Having seen pictures of a Centennial refinished by the restoration genius Mark Gregory I figured I would give it a try and do them myself. Amazing what you can learn from the internet. I sanded them all down to remove all the previous finish and darkened them to my liking and put on a few coats of clear finish. After letting that finish get hard I sanded them with very fine wet/dry sand paper and soap and water. Finished them up with extra fine pumice polishing powder. The rails came out better than I had hoped for. The finish is beautiful. Now I'm just waiting for my table mechanic Ernesto Dominguez to come and recover the table. Last step is to polish the metal.
Here are a few pictures of before and after.
