Custom Poker Table Build "Neo's Cardroom" (1 Viewer)

[NeoViny23]

PART 1 - THE WOODWORKING


After almost 18 years of using a selfbuild table topper that I really love to this day, I decided to build a custom poker table that fits 8 players. The beautiful self-build table from @5aces, which I had the chance to see first hand at the beginning of the year, was ultimately the trigger and motivated me to finally realize the idea...

This thread is some sort of the journey from the beginning to the end, including the obstacles that I had to overcome and of course with some recommendations, to avoid some of the little mistakes that I made during this process.

There were 2 requirements that the new table had to fulfill:

1) Since I had to carry the table downstairs to set it up in the living room, it had to be portable and able to be dismantled into individual parts to make transportation up and down the stairs easier. The table legs must be removable also, so that the weight of the base panel is not an obstacle during transportation.

2) I had to be able to store it in the same place as the previous topper! Since our house doesn't have a cellar, the only storage option is to slide the table under the bed. The old topper measures 145x95cm (sorry for the metric system ) and unfortunately there isn't much more space available. In the end, I opted for the maximum possible: 183x115cm. The first poker evening on 14.12. will show whether there will really be room for 8 players, but I'm confident that it will be fine.



So let's start the Journey

As woodworking is not one of my main tasks and since I don't have a workshop, I had to improvise in places. I had to do the woodwork in my garage, which unfortunately is anything but ideal for such work. I thought quit a bit about whether I should make the necessary cut-outs with the jigsaw or the router (which I didn't have before the project). In the end, I decided against using the router for the cut-outs as I had no experience with it and didn't want to risk ruining the boards. Fortunately, this turned out to be a very good decision, but more about that later. Following @5ace's construction plan, I opted for 3 panels of 16mm blockboard, which turned out to be a good decision due to its low weight.

So, from bottom to top and resting on a one and only brutally stable substructure:

1) base layer
2) playing field layer (including the cut out for the rail nose)
3) rail

After marking the curves by using a piece of wood, which I fixed with a nail exactly in the center of the desired circle (115cm table width divided by 2 = exactly 57.5cm from the edges), I used drive-in threads so that I could screw the various parts of the table together after transportation... Unfortunately, I made a mistake here because I attached the threads to the underside of the respective boards. The reason for this was that I didn't want to run the risk of them being felt through the play cloth or the upholstery. Unfortunately, this was a stupid and bad idea, because the threads I used turn loose when the previously tightened screws are unscrewed :-O Fortunately, this hardly matters in the end, as the rather thin cutting edge caused by the jigsaw doesn't allow much room for movement of the individual components anyway. With the large contact surface of the playing field plate, there is also so much traction that the plate resting on the base plate is very difficult to move. Sometimes I love physics hahaha... As soon as the rail is placed on top, no noticeable movement is possible between the rail and the playing field plate. puh, lucky me...

I thought long about the positioning of the detachable legs and took a few chairs into the garage for testing.

I tried to cut as slowly as possible with the jigsaw. Without having a rounding guide, the cuts were -of course- not 100% precise. But for my requirements, the result is still worth seeing and frankly, the upholstery also hides some unevenness. In the picture you can see the 3 panels lying on top of each other. However, I made the cut-outs for each panel individually, as the saw blade was not long enough to saw 3 panels at once. In addition, a material thickness of 3x16mm would have resulted in even greater unevenness. After making the cuts, I finished the rough edges by hand with sandpaper.

By the way: To make the base plate easier to transport, I cut out four recessed grips, which I rounded off with the router. This really works pretty good.

When sawing out the rail nose and the rail, I used clamps and pieces of wood to stabilize the outer ring. This prevented the outer cut-out from breaking off due to its own weight, the further I got with the saw. I loosened the individual clamps here and there as soon as I reached the spot with the saw. That worked wonderfully.

So here are the parts that I got so far, from front to back:

1) Rail
2) Rail nose
3) playing field panel
4) base panel

I then covered the rear part of the garage with a large sheet so that the area would not get completely dirty from using the router. I then slightly rounded off the top of the rail on the inside and outside with the router. This worked surprisingly well, considering that I had never worked with a router before.

As you can see above, I made a lot of marks on the boards so that I could quickly align them with each other.

Next, I connected the rail nose to the rail by applying wood glue over a large area.....

.....and then connecting the two parts with clamps. And just in case the question should arise: No, I didn't build a grandstand, it's just upside down )

To give the whole thing more permanent stability, I screwed in some screws as a precaution.

The project is slowly taking on the shape of a poker table.

Just screw on the table leg brackets and then the first set-up test in the living room can follow.

Really just a quick test, but man, even that was a very satisfying moment

But as we all know: the worst part is yet to come... the upholstery

 

[NeoViny23]

PART 2 - THE UPHOLSTERY

As it was too dirty and too cold in the garage for the upholstery work, I quickly moved the work into the living room. To prevent the foam and the artificial leather from being scratched by the tiles, I put painter's fleece and foil underneath. I also used the foil, as the fleece seemed to be quite coarse and sometimes (for whatever reason) contained small metal parts.


I used 2.5 cm (approx. 1 inch) thick and very firm foam for the rail padding. Basically, I wanted to glue the foam to both the rail and the side of the rail using spray adhesive. The adhesive was relatively strong and held quite well, but the adhesive only held to a limited extent when the foam was folded over. In the end, I decided to support the foam with painter's tape to prevent it from coming off. I probably could have done without this very time-consuming step. I'm sure it would have worked without the side taping - but in that case the upholstery would probably have been a bit trickier, as more force would have been required overall. In any case, I lost a lot of time during this step, as I had to remove the adhesive tape before the actual upholstery and of course, to cut the foam on the outside.

Yeah, that was a bad and ugly idea

Then I cut out the foam on the inside, or let's say that was the next step in the process. And man, even though I had read a lot of threads about upholstery, I was very unsure about cutting too much on the inside. So before I started I decided to do a little test with a small piece of the already cut out foam of the edges and a wooden board. I wanted to see how the material would behave while cutting. And frankly, this was worth its weight in gold, because in videos I've always seen the foam simply pulled up and then cut at right angles with an electric knife. In my case, however, I could see during the test that the foam could no longer be stretched exactly straight after a right-angled cut. It looked as if I had NOT cut exactly at right angles. I therefore set the knife at a slight angle on the inside - probably around 30 - 40 degrees as you can see in the picture. As a result, the foam was then quite flush when it was folded up. As I didn't have an electric knife available, I used a tomato knife - it worked surprisingly well! In my opinion, a smooth knife or even a cutter knife is not a good choice here, as the foam slows it down too much. Oh yes, before I forget: by testing, I was also able to measure the exact distance between the inside of the wood and the required cutting edge that was needed. I then traced the cut edge on the inside using the measurements I had determined.

After that, my wife and I cut the outside of the padding. Thank god, my wife supported me during the whole upholstery process! As you can see in the picture, unfortunately, some of the glued areas had come loose again and it was also quite difficult to cut the foam straight with a normal knife - I can only advise you to borrow or buy an electric knife if you don't have one. It saves nerves and a lot of time.

The next day we laid out the artificial leather and placed the rail on it. We based this on the great post that @Irish shared years ago. It was basically a great help, although you still have to rack your brains in places as to whether you're doing the right or wrong step.

We stapled the outer sides first and fortunately my wife vetoed it after we saw the result because I hadn't pulled the leather tight enough. So I loosened both sides completely with a staple remover and, after almost an hour's work, started again with the outside, this time stretching and stapling the leather with much more force. I probably should have pulled it even tighter. If I have to build a table again, I will hopefully remember this and tighten it as much as I can right from the start.

Then came the outer bends and here I have to admit that I lost a bit of patience. Although I stretched it relatively tightly and the leather was relatively smooth on the outside in places, there were still some creases left that I couldn't get rid of. At the time, I didn't realize what I could have done differently and I just didn't want to pull too hard for fear of the foam on the top of the rail becoming visibly taut. In the end, we would probably have had to use a hairdryer to soften the artificial leather so that we could have tightened it better. But unfortunately we only did this on the inside of the curves. But as we are not upholstery professionals, we were still happy with the result overall.

Then we marked the cutting lines for the inside. Man, that was also not as easy as it looks, since we absolutely didn't want to make any brutal mistakes at this point and after all this work.

We thought really long about how far we could cut to the edge on the inside and decided to stop a few centimetres beforehand with each cut. We first felt our way up to approx. 6 cm to the outer edge. The saying “the leather only tears when it has to” is definitely true: when we wanted to stretch the first inner long side, the leather already tore slightly at the transition to the curve. We therefore had to cut a little further here - in the end we ended up with approx. 4 to 4.5 cm, measured from the inside. I'm almost certain that we could have cut out almost a whole cm more.

After stapling the long sides, it was time for the difficult part (at least that's what I thought): the curves. Here, however, we used the hair dryer, which of course made it much easier to pull the leather. The stretching and stapling on the inside went surprisingly well, although we were already pretty exhausted at this point and were slowly running out of energy. But here we really pulled with all our might and the inside turned out pretty well in my opinion.

Since you can get everything out cleanly with the staple remover (the most important tool in my eyes), I can only recommend making things easier for yourself: here and there you can also place an additional staple or two to take tension out of the leather if you start in the middle on the inside of the curve and it is too tight at the beginning of the curve.

Almost done....

Now just cut off the excess leather and then comes the big moment: check to see if everything went well...

Our knees and back hurt, not to mention our fingers... So far so good...

Wow - despite the small creases on the outer sides of the curve, the result is absolutely impressive when you consider that amateurs were at work here. We are super happy with the result... so far...

Only the playing field is missing ... but that will follow in Part 3....

 

[NeoViny23]

PART 3 - INSTALLING THE FELT

After testing several fabric samples extensively (Chanman, Abbiati, pokershop.de, Matsui), I finally decided on Matsui. The scarf feels super soft, more like a kind of woven fabric and not as synthetic in terms of feel as other scarves. The print quality was also great, unfortunately the shade of gray I chose for my design was not 100% accurate and the gray areas almost look like a shade of brown. But that doesn't matter overall, because together with the bright orange lettering and the betting line, it looks very homogeneous. However, the cloth does have one disadvantage: most of the cards brake quite strongly on the cloth and dealing from one side of the head to the other is a challenge for the inexperienced. Time will tell whether the cloth was a good decision against this background - but it feels very comfortable at the table and that is a big plus for now.


Here is a screenshot of my artwork. I decided to set up the playing area in a very neutral way so that the chips are in the foreground and the entire picture doesn't appear too busy. That's why I chose black as the color for the betting area and dark gray for the outside area. In the betting area I included the Cologne Cathedral and a puffin as a silhouette in order to thematically incorporate my last two CPC custom sets. I'm very happy with the result, especially since I didn't hire a designer and developed the design entirely myself. I had also played with countless color gradients and patterns in the external area, but in the end I decided against it for the reasons mentioned above.

By the way: The black rail included in the artwork is only to visualize the look and was of course not printed

I decided to use a 0,5cm layer of very firm foam, that we call "coald foam" in germany - it is more durable than normal foam and will therefore hopefully remain stable for longer. It turned out to be a good choice so far because it feels very nice under the felt without beeing too soft.

After thinking a lot about "where" to cut the foam (should it go "just to the rail" or "under the rail"?), I finally decided to us the the cut out of the rail plate as a guideline for the cutting line. I could have placed the foam on the floor and placing the board on top afterwards, but I just wanted to avoid any risk of getting little pieces of dirt on the foam. Feeling some things that don't belong under the felt after installing the felt would be brutal. So I just placed the foam ON the panel and cut out the foam direclty at the edge by using scissors.

However, I first rehearsed a rough cut using the playing field panel. Practice is everything.

Then the final cut...

I covered the edge of the playing field with adhesive tape so that no glue sticks here. I then sprayed and glued both halves together using the spray adhesive recommended by Tony in his YouTube video, exactly as shown in his great video. Oh man, it's not a good idea to work with spray adhesive in the living room: we did hold large pieces of cardboard on the side of the spray area to protect the furnitrue. However, the glue is so fine that the spray mist doesn't care about the cardboard and still spreads at least a meter beyond the actual spray area just another bad idea .. so we switched to the garage again...

Now it's time to align the game cloth... in Tony's video it looks very easy - I mean, it is easy, but it took me almost 20 minutes to get the cloth exactly in the middle

Quote Tony Chan: " ... measure again"

After the aligning was done, I had to glue down the felt... and I did it exactly like Tony showed in his video..

I place one clamp in the middle of each long side and then I turned over one side of the fabric. Then I sprayed both the underside of the cloth and the foam evenly from a small distance (I would say 10 inches?). After waiting for about one minute to let the glue time to activate, I turned the cloth over and immediately measure whether the cloth is still straight. Readjust if necessary and and smoothed it out with his hands without using too much force to prevent the cloth from warping. Than I repeated that step on the other side of the felt.

A final test to make sure the fabric is exactly straight and then I stapled the fabric, taking care not to pull too hard. Here it is really only necessary to just tighten very lightly so as not to run the risk of distorting the look of the playcloth.

Cut the cloth quite close to the staples and that's it...

Now back to the living room, quickly tidy up everything, set up the table base and then finally cross the finish line after almost 35-40 hours and put all the individual parts together to get what it's all about: the finished custom poker table!!! Everything fits together nicely. The light-colored part that can be seen under the rail on the lower long side of the table is the wood of the base plate. I then clipped a plastic edge band over it to give the whole thing a nicer look.

... as you can see in detail on the next picture.

I have to thank @5aces for all his shared informations and of course I have to thank my wife for her help during the upholstery process. Without her I couldn't have done it.

I really loooooove how the result looks and I think the pressure point of the padding under the playmat is excellent. Apart from the fact that some card types don't glide perfectly (Desjgn are awfull to deal on that felt, Faded Spade and Trefl are much better) and apart the fact that the table is logically not 100% rock-solid due to the detachable table legs, the advantages of the table outweigh the disadvantages for me and I can hardly wait until the first round of poker with the local PCF guys takes place in just two weeks. Well, the first test run was very successful, since I was able to win the heads-up against my totally happy wife

 

[wuffle]

Love a good story and how the table comes to life!

 

[Eriks]

Love following these build threads! Looking good so far!

Edit: fantastic result, looks very nice!

 

[LeGold]

Watching!

 

[Bacon Dad]

Excellent job. Well done!!

 

[Kam]

The finish on the rail looks very professional, nicely done. Very satisfying to see from start to finish.

 

[carpenter]

Thats a great build. Nice work

 

[5aces]

Hey Dieter,
I'm very happy that I could help you. Looking at your results, it's an honor to have served as an inspiration to you. Thank you very much for the kind words about my MGM Grand table.

 

[NeoViny23]

Your MGM Grand Table is one of a kind and absolutely amazing!!!!

 

[Lts923]

Looks really good! I envy all the ability to work with your hands and equipment. I just donate chips and buy ins with mine ‍‍

Happy playing! I’d love to come lose some money there!

 

[Moxie Mike]

How's the stability of those threaded legs? They look like Adils from Ikea.

 

[NeoViny23]

I don't have experience with the Ikea Version, but the Ikea ones have a diameter of 4cm and mine have a diameter of 6cm and a very solid base plate... The legs can be screwed to the base plate very tight and overall its okay as long nobody hits the table from the side or kick the legs... I know it's a compromise and not a great option, but I had to take the risk since it has to be portable... I would love to use Gorilla legs but this would be a Challenge to carry it down- and upstairs due to the additional weight.

 

[PokerSTLplayer]

Turned out nice. Great work!