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Richard Jones Furniture

Gaming Tables 1997- 2003

Plywood, solid wood, various locking KD fittings, and specialist parts, e.g., playing cloth and pyramid cloth.
Spray polished with tinted pre-catalysed lacquer.

Dimensions for this example: H 1070 mm X W 1500 mm X L 3,900 mm. H 42-1/8”. X W 59”. X L 12’ 9-1/2”

For approximately six years until I moved from Houston and back to Great Britain I made many quick assembly gaming tables like this one, as well several other unrecorded examples of tables for different games for a regular customer. My customer 's business as one-night party casino host, corporate entertainer, etc, required him to go to a venue with a team of staff, set up a range of gaming tables, and provide the card dealers, croupiers and so on. At the end of the night the various gaming tables were disassembled, wrapped and packed into his trucks and vans and shipped back to storage premises where the parts were stored on racks ready for collection and use at another venue.

The various tables were made of small components light enough to carry that locked together to make up different gaming table configurations. My task when I was first was asked to make these gaming tables was to design and devise a modular 'knock-down' (KD) construction method that could be assembled and disassembled simply and efficiently by any non-specialist assembler. The parts I devised had to be tough, economical to make and interchangeable. This I managed to achieve through working on a series of prototypes until all the difficulties were ironed out.

However, these tables and their constituent modules suffered dreadful abuse in their daily life.They were dropped on the floor, exposed chip rail edges got scratched by rings and belt buckles, parts were sometimes not fastened properly and rolled around in the truck; and in one extreme example a curved end of a craps table was left on the ground while some other task took place and a large truck drove over it, smashing it completely. My client contacted me as soon as possible by phone, ordered a replacement table end and put his deposit cheque in the mail on the same day. Four days later he came to my workshop and collected the newly fabricated replacement. To turn around an order this fast I ordered all the materials immediately after my client's phone call and pulled out the necessary jigs and patterns; machined all the parts, assembled and glued these parts together, spray finished, and attached the pyramid cloth to the inside concave curve ready for collection.

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