I lost a couple of weeks from the flood and have been very busy but I have found some time to work on the lane. I am in the home stretch now. The lane is completely framed and I have started painting the sides and gutters. Also the ball return is coming along nicely. I’ll try and get some pics added in the next couple of days.

Worked all day on the lane yesterday and got a lot done. Finished framing almost all of the sides, got half of the top bedding finished, called it a day, and then the floods came. Yep, 2 inches of water flooded my basement. Never had a drop down there before and now this happens. My wife helped me shim the entire lane off the floor and out of the water. We spent all day Sunday cleaning up and surveying the damage. Hopefully we got the lane bedding out of the water quick enough to avoid it being ruined. My wife says this is just a trial and to keep working towards my dream, so I will.

A gentleman I had corresponded with who was also building a half-scale lane told me about some exact half-scale pins he found online. I shared the good news with my soon-to-be bride (who could not be more supportive of me and my dream, thank you Baby!) and she went out and contacted the company and surprised me with a new set of exact half-scale pins and an exact half-scale bowling ball for my wedding gift.

The pins are amazing, they are manufactured just as regulation-sized pins are, made of wood and plastic coated. They even have a glow effect under black light. They are amazing and very realistic, just exactly what I needed. So I knew that I could move ahead with the exact half-scale lane project now that I had the perfect pins and ball to compliment it.

Here are some shots of the new pins and ball.

New pins under the pindeck light

Artsy, outdoor shot of a pin 🙂

Left to Right: new pin, new ball, original, antique pin

Below: Pins under blacklight

Since I didn’t have the room required for a regulation-sized lane (it’s nearly 78 feet from the start of the approach to the end of the lane on a regulation lane) I started working with scaling the lane down to a size that I could put in my basement. Then I realized that the pins and balls have to be scaled to match whatever scale you are using or it will not work. I decided to use half-scale dimensions for the lane and looked for exact half-scale pins and ball.

I ran across an antique set of pins on Ebay in perfect shape, they were solid maple pins with 2 hand-turned solid wood balls. They were slightly less than half-scale so I started to make all of my dimensions off of that. The calculations weren’t nearly as easy as just dividing everything in half.

Here is the original/concept pindeck and pins. To match the scale of the ball and pins the lane is only about 18 3/4 inches wide. The pindeck is 3/4″ MDF with about 5 coats of polyurethane on it.

Below is the original game we played. We used the 4 foot pindeck, attached to an 8 foot piece of 3/4″ OSB flooring with a couple coats of polyurethane on it. I even made a makeshift ball return. My daughters and I had a lot of fun playing.