Maybe not necessary for your home use, but it may be for others. I have a table which 99% of the time is just me playing. I only use taom chalk so nothing really gets on the cloth (my hands are still spotless even after extended sessions). I vacuum regularly. But I ended up getting a polisher because the balls were quite noticeably dirty after a few months. I now give them a quick spin after every session.
Unless the platter is offset, the balls will only spin on one axis. It's possible the collisions change the axis but it's not ideal.
Table time is table time, regardless of who is playing. Even after an hour of play and handling, the balls are dirty with pocket smudges, collision marks and oil from your hands. If the table is not clean, the balls are also picking up chalk residue. I prefer to play with clean equipment at home which includes regularly vacuuming the table, cleaning the rails and giving the balls a spin in the polisher.
I think it is regular short nap carpet.
WWHHAATT???? It really doesn't matter how many players are playing, its the amount of shots that cause dirt build up since only 1 person shoots at a time.
Lol, no reason to make more of my comment then I intended to say. I am sitting in a restaurant having breakfast, and there is nobody else at home playing. I am the only user of my table. I imagine this arrangement is more common than not. Ball cleaners are very nice to have, but expensive, and for the number of times I need to have the balls cleaned it just isn't worth it for me. My pool balls look as nice as the day I got them new a year ago, and have only wiped them down briefly once. I usually play every day. Maybe a big difference is that I don't have returns on my pool table, just basket pockets.
I play alone on my table about 90% of the time but shooting an hour or 2 daily and you can start to see marks on the balls pretty quick. I also vacuum my table at least once per week, I dont chalk over the table, its covered whenever Im not shooting, but I do have ball returns but I doubt that makes them dirty, they are open wire style and I clean the ball box regularly as well as wipe the insides of the pockets. Whenever my balls don't like like they were taken right out of the box they go in the polisher. I have 2 sets of Aramith Tournament, a set of Centennial's, and a Cyclop set, with that much invested in pool balls the $500 bucks I spent on my polisher doesn't bother me nor does the wasting of valuable time cleaning them by hand. I always have 3 sets polished and ready to use sitting in trays, it only takes about 1:30 to gather them in a tray, drop them in the polisher and put a single drop of cleaner on every other ball and set the timer. I come back to a brand new out of the box looking set of balls. I started out polishing them by hand, I can tell you that the machine polishing made them look much better than the results I got by hand, it was a whole other kind of clean.
I tried the same thing to "reverse engineer" Diamonds polisher. You won't save as much money as you think unless you work in a machine shop. The motors are EXPENSIVE. Then you'll need to reduce the speed via a large pulley or gear reducer of some sort. Then you need to build the cabinet...and on and on and on. Save your time and effort and just buy one from Diamond. They do run a little hot, so I drilled some holes in my cabinet to help let some of the heat out.
The motors are thermal protected, if they get a little to warm, it'll shut off until it cools down. The key to keeping them running cool is to make sure you don't block the air breathing holes on the bottom of the cabinet.
It most certainly is possible to build a polisher that functions like a Diamond. I built mine in the Gold Crown aesthetic using the exact same parts and engineering that went into a Diamond so the balls spiral. It wasn't cheap, but I wanted a Gold Crown Polisher that functioned like a Diamond and that's what I've got.
