Rack ‘em up!
Handyman called his friends to report that the pool table would be retired for part of a day to refelt and relevel it. The refelting of a pool table that you usually are playing on would normally be great news, but most of the players of this table knew better. They know that it takes time to get a pool table flat, usually more than a day. So they called for a meeting to decide what to do.
Once there, they quickly decided to let the work begin, but to show up and help with the finishing work. Why? Because for some people, the words smooth and flat, are used to describe something less so — say for something that is not nearly smooth, nor nearly flat. They wanted to make sure the finishing work was done carefully and importantly with patience.
Greg, Ian and Ethan showed up just as Handyman had declared with some authority; “It’s done — I’m done for sure and if you guys want to do something else, then you go for it, but I’m totally done.” He clomped off to the other side of the room and sat down with a slight grumble. Everyone understood, he was ready to be playing pool again right now.
He knew what was coming, he also knew, these are his very good friends. He, therefore, resigned himself to the inevitable but sincere criticisms to come. He nevertheless was comfortably seated, and while waiting straightened out his work clothes and his other important items he wears while working. Within moments of his friend’s attention to his completed job, it was discovered and of course, was clearly pointed out to him, that yes, it did indeed need more hours of work to get it right.
The slate bottom of a pool table usually comes in three pieces, they will have a slight gap where they fit together, that gap must be filled, then sanded repeatedly to obtain a flat table surface over those gaps as close to perfectly flat as possible. People fill these gaps with putty or epoxy or other products, but if you want to do it correctly, you should use beeswax. Heated, then poured into the gap, then trimmed and sanded level multiple times.
In this particular case, after thinking the table finished, it took nine more hours with three people working as fast as they could to finish filling, sanding and trimming the gaps many times over to make the table more playable. Pool playing is a game of millimeters between success and failures, and never is that more true than when filling those gaps smoothly, and the correct leveling of the table.
As J.H. once said, in the midst of his elevating an ordinary table into an exceptional table, “flat isn’t necessarily level.”
How level to make your table depends entirely on what you want from the table, goofing off while you are having family fun doesn’t require a perfectly level table. Goofing off with friends you don’t need much of a level table either. Trying to be your very best at playing pool, however, does require a level table. If you get used