How to Disassemble an Olhausen Pool Table (7-Foot or 8') Without Turning the Move Into a $900 Mistake

The call came on a Tuesday afternoon in March 2024.

“Adrian, it's Dan. We're closing the old hall at the end of the month. The 8' Olhausen pool table has to come with us. And I want the Olhausen 7 foot pool table from the house in the new building too.”

Dan runs a small family entertainment center near Portland and was consolidating two locations into one. The new space included something he'd been planning for years: a private home bowling alley in the back, with the pool tables anchoring the front lounge. I'd moved his 8-footer in 2020, so he trusted me. The old hall had run a Wednesday league for years, and that 8-foot Olhausen was half the reason people kept showing up.

His office wall was covered with old Oaks Amusement Park photos. Not the roller-coaster shots—the grainy ones of the mid-century arcade and pool hall. Vintage tables, warm light, packed with people. “I want the room to feel like that,” he said, “without the smoke.”

If you've ever Googled “how to disassemble a pool table,” you already know the generic version: remove the pockets, remove the rails, remove the slate, move the frame. That's the skeleton. This is what happens underneath the steps.

I've handled pool table installations and moves for about six years. In that time, I've personally made four significant mistakes—totaling roughly $3,100 in wasted budget. The first was the expensive one. In 2018, I moved an 8-foot table and didn't label the shims under a three-piece slate. On reassembly, one seam sat 1/16 of an inch high. A ball crossing that seam hopped like it hit a speed bump. To fix it, the cloth had to come off, which meant new cloth, new labor, and a week of apologizing.

$890. That's what that lesson cost. Five minutes with a marker would have cost nothing.

By 2024, I'd built our team's pre-move checklist around that mistake. This job was about to show me why the checklist matters even when nothing you did is wrong.

The 48-Hour Decision

Dan wanted both tables moved in one day. The home bowling alley installers had booked the floor crew for the same week, so the old hall had to be empty before the concrete work started. That gave me two days to plan two moves. Normally I'd do a full site survey, measure every doorway, and walk the carry route with a tape measure. There was no time for that.

I had maybe 48 hours to decide. In hindsight, I should have pushed the move back by a week. But with the floor crew locked in, I made the call: survey Dan's house the morning of the move, move the 8-footer at the old hall first, then handle the 7-footer. It worked out—but only because I stuck to the basics.

How to Disassemble a Pool Table: The Order That Works

The 8' Olhausen pool table at the old hall was in good shape: three-piece slate, bolt-on rails, tight rail cloth. Every Olhausen I've moved has used the same general layout—the Accu-Fast cushion rails sit on top of the slate, and the slate sits on a frame with adjustable levelers. Here's the order we used:

1. Photograph everything. Every corner, every pocket, both faces of the slate, and the frame's levelers. Those photos ended up doing more work than any wrench on this job.
2. Remove the pockets with the right driver. Some were stapled, some screwed. Hardware went into labeled zip bags—one bag per pocket.
3. Mark each rail with painter's tape: L1, L2, L3, L4. The rails look interchangeable. They aren't. The foot rail carries the nameplate; the head rail has different joint lines. Swap them and the pockets won't line up.
4. Lift the slate, piece by piece. Number each piece with tape and mark its direction—head, middle, foot—so reassembly has no guesswork.
5. Label every shim. This is the step I skipped in 2018. Now each shim gets a number matching the slate piece and corner it came from.
6. Remove the legs from the frame and keep the levelers attached to the legs, wrapped in foam.

That's the order. Simple. The hard part is doing the first two steps even when you're running out of daylight.

The Hidden Rail Bolt

Then we moved to Dan's house for the Olhausen 7 foot pool table. The 7-foot size is what I recommend when a home game room is tight. It keeps the same Accu-Fast play surface as the bigger tables while taking up noticeably less floor space. The 8-footer is still the classic entertainment center workhorse, but next to a bowling lane, the 7-footer fits where the 8-footer won't.

The 7-footer had a one-piece slate. That's actually a heavier lift than a three-piece, because the weight has no seam to break it into sections. We cleared the playing surface, pulled the pockets, marked the rails, and started on the rail bolts. That's when the job turned.

On the right corner rail, one bolt turned about three-quarters of a turn and stopped. I pulled it anyway. The threads came out chewed and shiny. Someone had stripped the pocket during a previous move, then reinstalled the bolt with just enough torque to hide the damage—until you actually tried to remove it.

Dan stared at the bolt. “So the table's broken?”

“It was already broken.” I pointed to the threads. “See how the metal is clean? No rust, no old paint flecks. This happened the last time someone moved this table. Probably 2022.”

That's when the photos from twenty minutes earlier became the most valuable thing on the job. Dan had hired a moving company in 2022, and their paperwork said the table arrived damage-free. He never inspected the rails afterward. My photo, taken before I touched a bolt, showed the bolt head sitting slightly proud of the rail—a detail visible only when you enlarge it. It was proof the damage wasn't ours and wasn't recent.

The insurance adjuster asked for three written quotes. In Portland in early 2024, quotes to disassemble, move, and reassemble the 8-footer ranged from $480 to $620. I don't have hard data on what movers charge nationally—my experience is based on roughly forty tables, mostly in the Pacific Northwest—but that range matched the other pool table moves I'd priced that year. The replacement rail was the bigger line item for the 7-footer, and the claim covered it.

We swapped in the new rail before reassembly, leveled both tables, and finished the day.

The Checklist That Pays For Itself

After the move, Dan walked me over to the new home bowling alley. The installers were running laser levels across the approach, re-checking, and running them again. Their checklist was ridiculously long. It wasn't overkill. A pool table is the same: a level floor matters as much as a level slate. You can't level a table perfectly on a floor that drops an eighth of an inch under one leg.

You might wonder why I'm this open about my mistakes. The honest answer: the checklist I built after my third screw-up has saved us an estimated $8,000 in potential rework over the past two years. It has never once slowed a job by more than ten minutes.

Five minutes of verification beats five days of correction. That's it.

If you're planning to disassemble your own Olhausen, use the same discipline:

• Take photos before touching anything—all four corners, the slate seams, the underside of the frame.
• Label every rail with painter's tape. Four strips cost five cents.
• Number the slate pieces and shims, and write the position on the tape itself.
• Keep hardware in individual bags, one per pocket.
• If you're reusing the cloth, mark its head-to-foot direction. Billiard cloth has a nap, and installing it backward changes how balls roll.
• Never drag the frame. Remove the legs first.
• If a bolt feels wrong, stop. A trip to the hardware store is cheaper than drilling out a stripped pocket in an expensive rail.

And if you're still deciding on table size, measure the room before you measure the table. The Billiard Congress of America's published room-size guide suggests roughly a 16-by-13-foot space for a 7-foot table using standard 52-inch cues, and more for an 8-footer. Add a bowling lane and walkways, and the space disappears fast.

Disassemble with discipline, and take the photos. You'll probably never need them. But if you do, you'll be glad they're there.