Pool Table Slate Bed

Since the early 1800′s, slate has been the defacto choice for billiard tables. But there’s been a lot said about how thick it needs to be and how a certain type of slate from a certain country is better than another.

Italian slate is widely considered as being the best, but in the UK, Welsh blue slate is as good, if not better than anything else ever mined. This is simply due to two factors…the density and the water content.

The density of the slate is why we still use it – there is nothing else available that can provide a better mass to weight ratio, so no other substitute will give a better response than slate. The problem is that when it is cut into slabs, slate can warp or bowl. If the slate cannot hold water, it’s almost impossible to do anything with it, but if it does hold water, then the slate can be repaired, hence why many craftsmen prefer Italian.

However, these days, price is the biggest factor. Chinese slate can be 1/3rd the price of Italian and to most people this is all that counts. But…if you want precision pool, then you have to be sure that the slate is accurate to at least 1/100″ and so far only Italian and Brazilian slate can conform to this requirement, but Brazilian slate is less expensive and therefore the most popular of quality slates.

Thickness is not really an issue. John Thurston discovered in the first part of the 19th century, that once over an inch in thickness, performance doesn’t really increase, the only major benefit is a lack of ball rumble. However once you get past 1-3/4″ in thickness, any gains in performance are off-set by the requirement to produce increasingly heavy frames, thus causing one to cancel out the other.