ryden here we go orange ball top right pocket beautiful ray reading eddie charlton they've got nothing g'day folks uncle knackers here and welcome to my summer builds 2021 project [Music] check it out what an absolute little ripper i love it summertime's a great excuse to go outdoors and play a few games which was the inspiration for this project to build a pool table that you can take outdoors that is portable hangs up on the wall for storage and wait for it it rotates yep you heard right it rotates and why does it rotate well you better stay tuned to find out why let's go now the first thing we need to do is to cut the playing surface to size now for the playing surface i've got myself a sheet of plywood it's 1200 millimeters or four feet wide and this sheet is 2.4 meters or 8 feet long which is a bit too big for what i want so i'm going to cut this down to a length of 2 meters and 50 millimeters which is about 80 and three quarters of an inch now as you can tell i'm using this black form ply for the playing surface now this is the same stuff they use on construction sites for forming up concrete now there's two main reasons why i'm using the black form ply number one is that it comes out beautifully smooth straight and flat and number two is that the surface is waterproof to a certain degree which is great if you accidentally spill a drink which let's face it it's pretty unlikely as if you're going to be sitting around with your mates having a beer whilst playing pool it never happened no not on my watch now i just need to explain one thing very quickly regarding cutting the ply to size now the pool table is going to be made up of two sheets of plywood the first one is that 17 millimeter which i think is a touch over 5 8 of an inch black form ply that's for the playing surface and the second is a sheet of 12 millimeter or half inch marine grade ply that's for the base right oh listen up this is where you need to take note that playing surface the black form ply whatever size you cut that it needs to be about 20 millimeters or three quarters of an inch smaller in width and length than the marine grade ply that you're using for the base down below just remember that [Music] now with these two sets of templates that i've just knocked up i'll be using those to mark out the corner and the side pockets [Music] now with our corner pocket template i've got that pointy bit right there line that up to the corner of our playing surface and i've also got a mark in the center up here we want to line that up with our 45 degree line that we marked in earlier so place the corner on the corner like that and then the center on that 45 degree line that's looking pretty good and now with your pencil mark the corners bing bang and boom and then grab your combination square and run a 45 degree angle back from here and from over there beautiful now i've just placed a few white dots on all those corners using a white paint marker that just makes lining things up a bit easier now using the second part of our corner pocket template which is this one here line that up to our white dots and then we'll stick that down with some spray adhesive okay that looks pretty good now all we need to do is to repeat that process for the center pockets using our center pocket template [Music] [Music] beautiful okay it's time to cut the top rail for the pool table to length now i'm using two pieces of 89 by 19 millimeter pine which i'll laminate together and once i do that'll come to a height of 38 millimeters which is almost the standard height of a pool table cushion now i'll cut these to length the same size as the ply that we're using for the base and not to apply for the playing surface and just for the record if you're using my pocket hole template that will only work if you're using rails that are roughly the same size as mine [Music] okay those rails have now been cut and i've temporarily nailed them together and then clamped them down in place on top of the playing surface ready for the holes to be cut out for the pockets now if we have a look down here you'll also see that i've nailed on some 10 millimeter blocks on both sides of every corner that just makes it so much easier to line up the edges of that top rail to mark out the holes for the pockets the first thing we need to do is to draw a 10 millimeter line on the edge of both sides of that corner now these two lines here represent the edge of the playing surface plywood now grab our trusty old template once again and with the sharp end that bit there place that on the intersection like that and then swivel this around until that edge and that edge hit the top rail at exactly the same time which is about there that looks pretty good and then with your pencil mark each point bang and bang then just simply with your combination square run a 45 degree line off both of those points as you can see there next grab the second part of your template line that corner and that corner up with these two points just like that that looks pretty good and then with your pencil you can just run a few lines off that template and that'll give us a line for our jigsaw to follow [Music] beautiful [Music] oakley darkly there's that pocket all cut out and i have to say it didn't turn out too bad five more to go the next job on the agenda is to build the frame for the pool table and this is going to be the meat in the sandwich for those two sheets of ply and we're going to build this to exactly the same dimensions as the sheet of ply that we're using for the base now just a quick heads up this section here is the ball catchment area might have to workshop that phrase sounds a bit risque anyway just make sure that the inside rail is 160 millimeters which is about six and a quarter of an inch in from the outside edge [Music] now this is the center of our table and this is our center rail now you may have noticed that i've made a 13mm checkout just there and i've also added a ledge on this rail and this rail which sit down that 13 millimeters the same as our center rail now look this is purely experimental but what i'm thinking is using an off cut from that first sheet that we cut i'll drop that in place and then i'll screw on a lazy susan mechanism and then pretend this is the base of our pool table that'll sit on top just like that now if this pool table goes onto a much larger table it can be difficult to play certain shots so having this in place will enable us to rotate the table so we can make the shot now it could be an absolute disaster or it might be fantastic you'll just have to keep on watching and see what happens okay let's just get rid of that frame for the time being and concentrate on laminating the top rails by gluing nailing and screwing the boards together and just make sure you do that from underneath that way it won't be seen and don't forget to wipe off any excess glue as that can stain the pine plywood that's been cut leaves a sharp edge so i just
