Surprise, I’m A Dead Cushion

Sep 22, 2010

This job started out as a new flooring move, our clients were having their hardwood floors refinished and needed the pool table to be disassembled and moved while the work was being done. When we arrived at this home in Santa Ana, CA to start disassembling the pool table, I noticed that all the rails had dead cushions. When I relayed this information to my client, he was shocked to hear this. He told me that six years ago he had hired a well-known Billiard company in Orange, CA (not us), to completely restore the main components of his pool table, including the cushion rubber!

The table had been recovered with Simonis 860 spruce-colored cloth. I told him that I could recushion the rails and possibly reuse the existing rail cloth. He liked the idea of this, so when I unbolted the rails from the slate I took a look underneath and saw that the previous installer had not trimmed the excess cloth off the bottoms. About six weeks go by and we get word from the flooring company that the client is ready for the pool table to be re-installed, so we put them on our schedule. The next day, the Mr. calls and tells me that he wants to go with black tournament cloth, I grit my teeth a little and say sure. What he didn’t know, was that I painstakingly recushioned his rails all while keeping his spruce Simonis cloth from getting damaged. But, what the client wants the client gets, and we got a refelt out of it so I guess it’s a win-win.

The cloth we used on his pool table was Aramith Tournament 24oz. worsted wool. Oh, by the way, the cushion rubber we use is Velocity K-66. It has a higher blend of gum rubber and less clay filler. We guarantee our cushion rubber for a minimum of 15 years. Inferior rubber seems to harden prematurely due to a higher concentration of clay filler.