My Cousin and My Ping-Pong Conversion Top
Sunday, December 27th, 2009 | Great Sites
Ping-pong isn’t our only contention. My first cousin and I were always competitive… maybe excessively competitive. It could be as slight as whom could consume food quicker or eat more… who could eat slower or in smaller amounts. It didn’t matter. If there was a way one mortal could best the other in something, we would contend.
Unfortunately, the tiny house my wife and I bought does not have a ton of space for the many ways my cousin and I desire to compete. Following much deliberation, my wife and I finally settled on a pool table with a table tennis conversion top. Basically this provides us the ability to play either billiards or ping-pong on the same table in the same room.
So now our notorious rivalry proceeds. Of course, he constantly kvetches that it is not the true thing. Even though he ordinarily bests me in pool, every single instance we place the table tennis conversion top upon the pool table, it appears his game errs.
To put it simply, I think it’s because I am just simply the greater ping pong player. But regrettably, he has too numerous excuses. The height isn’t right. The dimensions are incorrect. The list proceeds on. So I procured the measuring tape. The height and proportions are right on to the official table tennis proportions. Then he postulated the table had the incorrect bounce; that somehow the pool table beneath affected the velocity and height of the ball bounce.
So we investigated the official bounce measurement (yes, there’s an official bounce measurement). It is for each 30 centimeters of drop, there should be a 23 cm bounce. We tested the bounce in over a dozen placements on the conversion top. In every place the ball bounced virtually perfectly straight up and almost exactly 23 cm high. So you realize, ping pong conversion tops do a perfectly good job duplicating a good game of ping pong. And my cousin has no excuses. I’m just the superior table tennis player.