Outdoor Foosball Table Playing Surface

[senlow]

I’m refurbishing a Spartan Sports foosball table and am looking for some advice from the collective.

It’s a decent quality indoor/outdoor table. I plan to use it outside, under a patio cover, at my daughter’s house. The plan is to cover it when not in use.

• The housing is steel, with 3” square steel legs. It’s strong, rigid, and with some good paint should pretty corrosion resistant.
• Anodized aluminum, solid rods.
• Plastic players.
• Non-magnetic stainless fasteners.

The main problem with it is that the playing surface *****. It’s 1/8” thick plastic that is horribly warped from the sun. It should be fairly simple to adapt it to use thicker material. I think that the table could be modified to use up to a ¾” thick playing surface. I’m looking for some material that’s stiff, weather resistant and reasonably priced. What should I use?

 

[Chipm]

HDPE panel like they use on playgrounds and outdoor signs?

 

[Spareparts]

The tables we built in Irving Tx, all had 1/4" tempered glass tops, these were commercial
coin operated tables, never worried about them breaking, and they were fast. We rented
a building in a Mall, old grocery store, and had a rec center in their, Foosball, Pool, air hockey,
Snack Bar, and fountain drinks. We had Foosball Tournys often. The last one we had the grand
prise was A Table we made and had acquired some Budweiser Formica. We placed it in the front
window. One day about a week before the tourny ended a couple of gentlemen along with their Lawyer
and one police officer came in Informed us that we were not Licensed to have their Brand Name on that item
and took it. Lucily we had made two of them so we lucked out on that one, The other one was stored
off site and delivered to the winner, covered up during delivery and into their game room. We sold the buisness
shortly after.

 

[senlow]

The tables we built in Irving Tx, all had 1/4" tempered glass tops

Wow, that's good to know! I knew that some commercial tables used glass, but I just assumed that it was much thicker than 1/4". Did you have to put anything underneath the glass to keep it flat? Also, what did you to create the playing field graphics?

I will have to look into having a piece of tempered glass fabbed up.

 

[Spareparts]

The playing field was printed on the back side of the glass, we made several of these tables, close to
100 so getting the glass printed wasn't a problem. These were a copy of the Best Brand table from Irving
Tx. The top of the table was white formica and the glass over that, it made it stand out. This was in 1975
and my memory isn't all that good anymore, I'am 79 now. Almost all of our tables were coin operated,
maybe 6-or 8 were for personal use.