It’s Finally Done.
This was an extensive project that took me well over two months of planning, followed by two weeks of frantic work in every spare moment of time I had available.
What was the project, you ask? A sixty or seventy year old shuffleboard table.
I’m sure many people are going, “What? What’s a shuffleboard table?” To answer this, let me couch it in more widely known terms. The game of shuffleboard is somewhat like the sport of Curling, but rather than slinging a forty pound rock on a giant slab of ice, you instead slide a twelve ounce puck along a flat twenty-two foot long table that is “lubricated” by a powder-like substance that is actually tiny balls of granulated wax, which act as ball bearings.
The object of the game is to get your weights to stop inside various scoring zones on the far end of the board. There is the foul line, two thirds the way down the table. You have to make it past this for your shot to count at all. Past that there are three scoring zones. Anything between the foul line and the first score line is worth 1 point. between the first score line and the second is worth 2 points, and anything past that to the end of the table is worth three points. and of course, anything that falls off the edges or ends of the table is worth nothing.
Pretty simple, right? Yeah. Not so much. Each player “throws” four weights each, alternating players after each throw. Getting the weight to stop where you want it to is honestly really hard to do. Like in curling, any spin imparted on the weight will cause its path to curve, especially towards the end of the slide as it begins to slow down. Also, it is perfectly legal for a player to use his weight to knock his opponent’s weight off the table. The competition can get quite cutthroat.
The Table As It Was:
At first, we thought this table was from around the late 1970’s or early 1980’s, because of the style of shag carpet that was used to line the bottom of the gutters. However, upon further research into the scoreboard (which was non-functional and really… unrecoverable as anything other than decoration), it was discovered that this shuffleboard table was actually much older than that. The American Shuffleboard Company built this model in the 1950’s, but was refinished in the early 80’s. As you can see, it was much abused over the course of its lifetime since the last restoration.
I was able to find a company that could refinish the playing surface. Oddly enough, the company that did it was the same one that did the restoration in the 80’s. All the rest of the refinishing I did myself, taking it all down to bare wood and re-staining the red oak underneath. A beautiful transition, let me tell you!
I used to play that game a lot. Hard to find tables anymore. It's a fun game.
Well done, sir! WELL DONE!!!