I stopped by Malarkeys last week just to take a look at the place, since I haven't spent much time in Washington State over the last 8 or 9 years just to check on the condition of the pool room. Last time I was there, Rick Jones still owned the place, so as some of you know, that's been a while:grin:
I was pretty impressed with how the place has evolved from when it first opened up tell now. 11 GC1's & 2's, and 10 Valley 7ft bar boxes, full bar and restaurant, great food I might add:grin: tables are all spaced out real nice too, and the whole place is real clean, I like that. Clientèle looked real good too, didn't see anyone that I would have considered undesirable in any of the 3 pool rooms I owned in the past, so that was good as well.
Knowing most all of the table mechanics in the Pacific Northwest are not much more than cloth installers, I decided to take a look at the tables, mostly the Brunswick's, as it's kind of hard to really mess up bar boxes just installing cloth. The 9ft's looked pretty much as I expected them to, terrible is the only word I guess fits the way to describe them.
Clark came in after I was already there, so I met him officially for the first time, introduced myself, and he gave me a tour of the place. We talked about the work he's had done on the tables, who's done the work in the past, and that the last person that worked on the tables was out of Spokane, WA. some 275 miles away. I told Clark that it's not that anyone was doing bad work on his tables, it's just that no one was actually "fixing up" his tables either, and they needed more work done to them than just changing the cloth. I told Clark that I'd be in Washington for a little while and that if he was interested, I'd be willing to fix up one of his Gold Crowns just as I've done with so many others in the past, but I've never rebuilt a Gold Crown in a pool room before because I've just always avoided pool rooms in the past. It's one thing to rebuild a Gold Crown for someones home, it's another thing to rebuild one in a pool room, and be looking at 10 more to go, because this kind of work requires a lot of patience and time, something I really don't have a lot of:grin: After looking at the tables with Clark and discussing what was wrong with all the tables, I could see he was a little curious, yet reserved about having me work on his tables, so he told me he'd be interested in having me work on ONE table, so he could see how it turned out, as he wasn't willing to commit all his tables to be worked on at this time, to someone he really didn't know much about, so we agreed to get one table straightened out.
I came back the following week and got started on fixing one Gold Crown 1. This table was really messed up. It had the wrong cushions on it, someone in the past had installed Artemis K66 pool cushions on the rails, lowered them down on the sub-rails to get the nose of the cushions at the right height, but didn't change the sub-rail bevel to accept the K66 cushions, so the table played slow, and the banks were short.
I've designed a new tooling system that allows me to rebuild the rails by re-cutting the bevel for the cushions while the rails are still bolted to the slate, which is the most accurate way possible to do this kind of work, so far I'm the only table mechanic in the world with this tooling:grin:
So, I'll show you some of the work I did to the rails to get them back to the way they're suppose to be.
In this first picture, because the top of the sub-rail had been belt sanded at a downward angle to match up with the lowered down K66 cushions, I had to cut off the top of the sub-rail so that it was flat, then glue on new wood to replace what I'd cut off, then I stapled it in place by using a strapping table to staple through, that way when I pulled off the strapping tape, all the staples would come out with it.
Here you can see the wood I added, and how thick it is.
In these pictures, you can see the passes I made with some of my new tooling to remove the excess wood to get it down to the thickness I wanted which is 1 11/16"ths from the top of the sub-rail to the bed of the slate.
Here I added the wood extensions and re-cut the bevel of the sub-rail to take the new Artemis Intercontinental K55 cushions.
Glen
I was pretty impressed with how the place has evolved from when it first opened up tell now. 11 GC1's & 2's, and 10 Valley 7ft bar boxes, full bar and restaurant, great food I might add:grin: tables are all spaced out real nice too, and the whole place is real clean, I like that. Clientèle looked real good too, didn't see anyone that I would have considered undesirable in any of the 3 pool rooms I owned in the past, so that was good as well.
Knowing most all of the table mechanics in the Pacific Northwest are not much more than cloth installers, I decided to take a look at the tables, mostly the Brunswick's, as it's kind of hard to really mess up bar boxes just installing cloth. The 9ft's looked pretty much as I expected them to, terrible is the only word I guess fits the way to describe them.
Clark came in after I was already there, so I met him officially for the first time, introduced myself, and he gave me a tour of the place. We talked about the work he's had done on the tables, who's done the work in the past, and that the last person that worked on the tables was out of Spokane, WA. some 275 miles away. I told Clark that it's not that anyone was doing bad work on his tables, it's just that no one was actually "fixing up" his tables either, and they needed more work done to them than just changing the cloth. I told Clark that I'd be in Washington for a little while and that if he was interested, I'd be willing to fix up one of his Gold Crowns just as I've done with so many others in the past, but I've never rebuilt a Gold Crown in a pool room before because I've just always avoided pool rooms in the past. It's one thing to rebuild a Gold Crown for someones home, it's another thing to rebuild one in a pool room, and be looking at 10 more to go, because this kind of work requires a lot of patience and time, something I really don't have a lot of:grin: After looking at the tables with Clark and discussing what was wrong with all the tables, I could see he was a little curious, yet reserved about having me work on his tables, so he told me he'd be interested in having me work on ONE table, so he could see how it turned out, as he wasn't willing to commit all his tables to be worked on at this time, to someone he really didn't know much about, so we agreed to get one table straightened out.
I came back the following week and got started on fixing one Gold Crown 1. This table was really messed up. It had the wrong cushions on it, someone in the past had installed Artemis K66 pool cushions on the rails, lowered them down on the sub-rails to get the nose of the cushions at the right height, but didn't change the sub-rail bevel to accept the K66 cushions, so the table played slow, and the banks were short.
I've designed a new tooling system that allows me to rebuild the rails by re-cutting the bevel for the cushions while the rails are still bolted to the slate, which is the most accurate way possible to do this kind of work, so far I'm the only table mechanic in the world with this tooling:grin:
So, I'll show you some of the work I did to the rails to get them back to the way they're suppose to be.
In this first picture, because the top of the sub-rail had been belt sanded at a downward angle to match up with the lowered down K66 cushions, I had to cut off the top of the sub-rail so that it was flat, then glue on new wood to replace what I'd cut off, then I stapled it in place by using a strapping table to staple through, that way when I pulled off the strapping tape, all the staples would come out with it.
Here you can see the wood I added, and how thick it is.
In these pictures, you can see the passes I made with some of my new tooling to remove the excess wood to get it down to the thickness I wanted which is 1 11/16"ths from the top of the sub-rail to the bed of the slate.
Here I added the wood extensions and re-cut the bevel of the sub-rail to take the new Artemis Intercontinental K55 cushions.
Glen
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