Billiards, Bourbon and a Bullet

May 22, 2011

This 21-year-old Golden West pool table was involved in an unfortunate handgun accident. The Eastvale, CA resident came by our Orange County pool table shop to check out some options for setting up and refelting his older eight-foot billiard table. The heavily tattooed, soft-spoken gentleman hinted to my wife about the history of his pool table, telling her why he wanted to keep the table. His dad had bought the billiard table for him in the early 90s with the hopes of keeping him out of the local bars.

I was unaware of the actual condition of the table when I arrived at his home. I was prepared to do a routine pool table install and refelt with the Jack Daniels cloth that he had picked out. That’s when I noticed that there were no feather strips in the rails and three or four of the cushions were dead. I expressed my concerns to him and he decided to have us recushion all six of the rails. He also decided that he wanted new leather pockets, instead of the used ones he had previously picked out at our shop. We proceeded to assemble the frame and position it in the room. I did some pre-leveling before we brought in the slate from the garage. I installed the slate screws, wrapped up the rails, and headed back to the shop.

I came back two weeks later to finish leveling the slates and install the custom Jack Daniel’s cloth. The pool table played excellent with the new cushions and the balls rolled so smoothly over the new cloth.