I bought a cheap table, help me make it great for playing on

D

derangedhermit

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My dream table was a 7' Diamond Pro (for the drop pockets with my bad back, and lack of room for a bigger table), one piece slate, pro-cut pockets. The cost was unjustifiable.

I checked into Valley's, and it seems their best home table is the Panther. But it's still a ball return table, and I wasn't sure of the slate thickness, and I didn't like the non-standard side pocket size. An immediate refit with Ridgeback rails and new cloth seemed a necessity, raising the price close to the range of a tournament-used Diamond Pro-Am (again, a ball return table.)

So I bought a Brunswick Contender Black Wolf, drop pockets. It comes with the two pedestal leg setup. It comes with Brunswick standard 1" framed slate. I upgraded to Brunswick Centennial cloth. I am having them add 1/8" shims to get the pocket jaws to 4.5". It has flat, wider rails than many tables. The feet are leveling. The pocket corners do stand a bit proud, but since they are plastic and non-structural, I figured I wouldn't be bleeding or scratch my shafts, etc.

One concern I have is the weight. Even with the 1" framed slate, it weighs only 580 lbs. A 9' GCV weighs over 1200 lbs. Should I put plastic bags of dry sand in the pedestals to add a few hundred pounds for stability?

I didn't ask them to upgrade the Contender Tru-Speed cushions. They have no cloth covering. They are made by Goodyear. Should I ask for Superspeed cushions, if they can be fit to Contender rails?

What else can I do to make this the best-playing table it can be?

Thanks for any help.
Lee
 
I changed the order to a Brunswick Centurion 8'. Feeling better about the whole thing. It's not my dream table, but it and its predecessor, the Century, have given decades of service in pool halls all over the country.

For another couple thousand bucks, I guess I could have had two Diamond guys drive a table down to Texas in a van. It seems strange to me there is no Diamond distributor in a place as large as Dallas / Fort Worth.
 
derangedhermit said:
My dream table was a 7' Diamond Pro (for the drop pockets with my bad back, and lack of room for a bigger table), one piece slate, pro-cut pockets. The cost was unjustifiable.

I checked into Valley's, and it seems their best home table is the Panther. But it's still a ball return table, and I wasn't sure of the slate thickness, and I didn't like the non-standard side pocket size. An immediate refit with Ridgeback rails and new cloth seemed a necessity, raising the price close to the range of a tournament-used Diamond Pro-Am (again, a ball return table.)

So I bought a Brunswick Contender Black Wolf, drop pockets. It comes with the two pedestal leg setup. It comes with Brunswick standard 1" framed slate. I upgraded to Brunswick Centennial cloth. I am having them add 1/8" shims to get the pocket jaws to 4.5". It has flat, wider rails than many tables. The feet are leveling. The pocket corners do stand a bit proud, but since they are plastic and non-structural, I figured I wouldn't be bleeding or scratch my shafts, etc.

One concern I have is the weight. Even with the 1" framed slate, it weighs only 580 lbs. A 9' GCV weighs over 1200 lbs. Should I put plastic bags of dry sand in the pedestals to add a few hundred pounds for stability?

I didn't ask them to upgrade the Contender Tru-Speed cushions. They have no cloth covering. They are made by Goodyear. Should I ask for Superspeed cushions, if they can be fit to Contender rails?

What else can I do to make this the best-playing table it can be?

Thanks for any help.
Lee
Click to expand...

Why are you not looking at used? Used pool tables are a dime a dozen.
 
macguy said:
Why are you not looking at used? Used pool tables are a dime a dozen.
Click to expand...

I have been looking at used. The ones I've been finding on craigslist and ebay (within 250 miles) are a bunch of home tables. I don't want a fancy piece of furniture with Queen Anne legs, external leather pockets with fringe or whatnot, a narrow rail...I want a table where the design and money went into playability and durability.

I've also checked the listings at the billiards stores that sell new and used.

One limitation is I wanted a drop pocket table, so out go things like Valley and Diamond Pro-Ams. Another is I can't fit a 9' or oversized 8, so out go all the GCs and most all the Diamond Professionals. There are currently a number of Diamond Pros for sale in the area, having come out of, I think, the local Fox & Hounds after about 20 years of use. My understanding is those have gotten redesigned (improved) somewhat in the meantime, and I'd start off with 2K in a table that needed a lot of work.

Another is I'm no table mechanic, and the table style I want is basically a commercial table. Those you can sometimes find cheap, but they have usually seen decades of use and abuse, and maybe not such good maintenance. What you are as likely to find at these low prices is a mixture of parts from different tables of the same model.

I looked last week in person at an 8' Olio GC copy that might have been OK, but the rail laminate was chipped off all along the edge from bad cushion recover jobs, and the cushions looked original (from the 1980s). There was a wooden shim, like you use to square up door frames before installing the trim, between the main crossbrace and the slate, tapped in "just enough" I suppose, to take the sag out.

I guess I could have kept looking, but I got tired of not finding what I wanted after looking at ads for 50 or 100 tables a day.
 
I'm no expert on tables but I do know one thing. Be patient!

Don't go jumping the gun for something u might not necessarily want.

There's plenty of decently used diamond bar boxes for sale. Just have to wait for a tournament to finish.

There has to be someone on this site that an help u find one! :eek:
 
IamCalvin06 said:
I'm no expert on tables but I do know one thing. Be patient!

Don't go jumping the gun for something u might not necessarily want.

There's plenty of decently used diamond bar boxes for sale. Just have to wait for a tournament to finish.

There has to be someone on this site that an help u find one! :eek:
Click to expand...

Drop pocket is a requirement. I wish Diamond would come up with a table construction like a Pro-Am that allowed for drop pockets and without such a big box underneath. I understand the Professionals are a completely different frame design, cannot be shipped as an assembled unit with bolt-on legs, and require more on-site assembly.

According to the pricing I got, a (ball-return) 7' Pro-Am would have cost the same, installed, if I could find one locally, as I paid for the 8' Centurion - otherwise, from Diamond, about $400 more. A new 7' Pro-Am (still drop pocket) would be $1000 more. The Centurion is more table and more of what I want.

I could have gotten a Valley Black Cat, Tiger, and maybe a Panther in an 8' drop-pocket model. But not used. The non-standard side pockets of those put me off them. I think Ridgeback rails partially addresses the side pocket issue, but am not sure. By the time I put on Ridgebacks and Simonis, I'm within a few hundred of the Centurion.
 
derangedhermit said:
Drop pocket is a requirement. I wish Diamond would come up with a table construction like a Pro-Am that allowed for drop pockets and without such a big box underneath. I understand the Professionals are a completely different frame design, cannot be shipped as an assembled unit with bolt-on legs, and require more on-site assembly.

According to the pricing I got, a (ball-return) 7' Pro-Am would have cost the same, installed, if I could find one locally, as I paid for the 8' Centurion - otherwise, from Diamond, about $400 more. A new 7' Pro-Am (still drop pocket) would be $1000 more. The Centurion is more table and more of what I want.

I could have gotten a Valley Black Cat, Tiger, and maybe a Panther in an 8' drop-pocket model. But not used. The non-standard side pockets of those put me off them. I think Ridgeback rails partially addresses the side pocket issue, but am not sure. By the time I put on Ridgebacks and Simonis, I'm within a few hundred of the Centurion.
Click to expand...

Zig zag thinking:

If you lust after a 7ft Diamond, by all means, that is the table you should buy.

I am not familiar with specifics of the Diamonds - but I would be stunned if there were
not some way of fitting some version of a pocket into them. Failing that - I'm sure
The Cobra could come up with a solution.

If need be - you could always jerry-rig some rube goldberg device that would enable
you to retrieve balls from the box without bending and stressing your back.

It just CAN"T be all that hard.

Dale(ceo of bright ideas inc, llc)
 
How tall are you? I'm 6' 3" with a bad back and I raised my 9' GC 6". It's night and day better for my back. You might want to consider that when your table is installed. Actually you'll have to consider it beforehand, to prepare blocks to raise it:)

On ball return tables, I've heard of people blocking the bottom of the pocket with towels or foam blocks that effectively turn them into drop pockets.
 
I lust after a 9' Gold Crown V. A 9' Diamond Pro would be fine, too, they play great but my preference is for the GCV because I really like the looks. But my wife said I couldn't remove the bathroom walls so either of those would fit in the room. I did ask her, by the way, more than once.

Bigger is better for my purposes - this is mainly a practice table, and I don't want to practice mostly on a 7' table and then try to shoot on 8's and 9's. So 8' it is.

I will ask the installers to get the table up as high as the built-in leg levelers allow. I might have something like four 2"x12"x12" pine blocks cut just to try it out. Or should what goes under the legs be made of something else?

I don't want to go too far away from standard, since I think that may cause problems shooting on other tables. I bet the average height of pool tables hasn't increased along with the average height of people in the 20th (and now 21st) century, and that's a shame. I'm 6' 1", used to be 6' 2".

I like things just so, and wouldn't be satisified buying a nice ball return table and stuffing foam in the tubes. My guess why Diamond doesn't offer a simple conversion is that a drop pocket Pro-Am wouldn't hold enough balls in each pocket without a redesign.

In any case, I'm not complaining about anything. I think I wouldn't have been pleased with the 7' Contender Black Wolf. I believe I'll be very pleased with the 8' Brunswick Centurion.

I even have an old set of Brunswick Centennial Gold Crown balls I bought a couple years ago off ebay. I think the Centurion is where they belong.
 
Just curious the Brunswick site shows an 8' drop pocket Centuron is $5200. How much did you actually pay? (I've always assumed those are retail prices and not actual out the door prices). I've never seen that table before but it does look nice. Definitely has a commercial look to it instead of a furniture look. Enjoy!
 
iusedtoberich said:
How tall are you? I'm 6' 3" with a bad back and I raised my 9' GC 6". It's night and day better for my back. You might want to consider that when your table is installed. Actually you'll have to consider it beforehand, to prepare blocks to raise it:)

On ball return tables, I've heard of people blocking the bottom of the pocket with towels or foam blocks that effectively turn them into drop pockets.
Click to expand...

We have 9' ProAms where I play. When we play 1-Pocket we insert foam blocks into the pockets. They work great and I would think that would do the trick for you. It's a easy and inexpensive fix for your problem.
 
iusedtoberich said:
Just curious the Brunswick site shows an 8' drop pocket Centuron is $5200. How much did you actually pay?
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It's a bit complicated, because there was a standard accessory package included, most of which I didn't need, so I got credit for those items. I think it's safe to say the table itself with Centennial cloth was under $4000, including delivery and installation. Simonis 860 was an option and would have cost about the same.

The salesperson I worked with was excellent - very patient, trying to work with me to get just what I wanted (to the extent he could figure out what that was), and very willing to swap things out (even the first table I picked and bought the day before), give store credit (which I immediately spent), turn in an order for a nice custom cover...I was there three times and took up probably two hours of his time.
 
derangedhermit said:
Your opinion is that a Centurion is a Pinto?
Click to expand...

That's more literal than I intended, I meat more along the lines of something like there are inherent differences between things that cannot be changed, no matter what one does.

One could certainly do worse than a centurion and having a table at home is absolutely great. Enjoy, didn't mean to imply you wasted money on something that was known to blow up.:)
 
jbullerjr said:
http://forums.azbilliards.com/showthread.php?t=357365

These were sold not that long ago.
Stuff like this comes up every so often.
I would wait.
I have a diamond 7 and can tell you no other table is going to compare exactly.
Certainly not an 8 footer
Click to expand...

I'd probably want the 2010 or later rails ("Blue Label") to put on one of those, so there's that.

A new Diamond 7' Pro-Am was going to cost me about $5000 delivered, maybe a little less. "Tournament used" that were available when I was looking would have saved six hundred off that, but still cost me more than the 8' Centurion. And no stuffing foam in the gulleys.

I'm happy with where I came out. I think it will be a very playable table. I've got to double check that the order has the pocket shims for 4.5" at the jaws. The standard Brunswick corner pockets seems to be 4.75".

There was a Medalist in Houston I thought about driving down to have a look at. That would be a nice table, if it is in, or can be put back in, good shape.
 
Changed again

It turned out that the wait was indeterminant on the Brunswick Centurion - beyond 4 weeks, which meant to me they probably don't have a production run scheduled. None in stock in the D/FW area. This is ery different than the two weeks I was told it would take.

I rarely accept that sort of uncertainty.

So that deal is off, and Diamond is building me a new 8' Professional, guaranteed delivery in less than 6 weeks. I'm having it shipped by freight and will use a local mechanic, since that removes uncertainty about when a Diamond truck load of tables will be headed this way, it's cheaper, and I can pick the installer.
 
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derangedhermit said:
It turned out that the wait was indeterminant on the Brunswick Centurion - beyond 4 weeks, which meant to me they probably don't have a production run scheduled. None in stock in the D/FW area. This is ery different than the two weeks I was told it would take.

I rarely accept with that sort of uncertainty.

So that deal is off, and Diamond is building me a new 8' Professional, guaranteed delivery in less than 6 weeks. I'm having it shipped by freight and will use a local mechanic, since that removes uncertainty about when a Diamond truck load of tables will be headed this way, it's cheaper, and I can pick the installer.
Click to expand...

Good for you. In my personal opinion, the Professional looks way better than the Pro/AM:) And as I'm sure you found out, you can customize it quite a bit with the corners, the wood choices, the paint scheme, etc.
 
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