Yesterday we were on a pool table job in Laguna Niguel, CA. The owners of this nine foot pool table were moving to Colorado and needed the pool table experts to help with getting this massive pool table disassembled and loaded into their rented moving truck. No problem for us, that’s what we do on a daily basis.
We started by detaching the leather pockets and then un-bolted the rails. We carefully slid the two “U” shaped sections of rails off the table and laid them upside down on the floor. We then removed the bolts that fastened the leather pockets to each rail section. While this was going on my assistant was carefully removing the felt that covered the slates. This particular model of pool table had the felt glued onto the slate. So he had to be really careful not to rip it while it was being detached from the perimeter of the slate. Once this tricky task was done, we move on to removing the slate screws. After removing the last screw and before moving the slate pieces out I always mark the slates with a “head” for the end that was the breaking end of the table. Then I’ll draw an arc across the three pieces and I’ll number the pieces 1,2,3. After we’ve moved the last piece of slate off of the cabinet, I’ll mark “head” on the wood where the head piece of slate was resting.
Now we un-bolted the four legs and bored four holes into two sturdy cross-members, then bolted the legs to the inside of cabinet. We carefully folded and wrapped the felt and packed it in a box with the six pockets, pool balls and any other small pool table related items. I inter-locked two rails and laid out a moving pad on the floor and wrapped the rails sort of like making a big burrito, making sure I rolled them a few times then folded the ends inside then rolled again and taped the ends shut.
This pool table was now ready to be trucked up to Colorado safely.