The Carpenter’s Wheel Tournament Board – a unique piece by Jack Furnival
Playing Carrooka is easy, mastering Carrooka will take a lifetime! Place the board on any table, set up the counters and flick the striker to slide the counters into the pockets. Rotate the board to line up your shots, so there’s no need to move around, making Carrooka truly accessible for all. Build your scores, watch out for those foul shots and challenge your family or friends in rounds of fierce but friendly competitive play! Don’t worry, we include full instructions so you can master all of the details.
For five years Jack and George made every Carrooka board themselves by hand, but now licensed makers create the standard birch range of boards (links to suppliers on our home page), which has given Jack time to explore the possibilities of creating stunning one-off Carrooka tournament boards.
This board is one of the first three that uses hardwood veneer “patchwork” pieces of maple, walnut and cherry, to create a unique design. Each piece has been meticulously cut and sanded by hand to tessellate snugly, whilst keeping the super smooth Carrooka playing surface.
The rail is solid cherry hardwood and has been chosen for its colour and grain (as well as rebound hardness to make sure your counters bounce off the rail with force!)
As with all of the boards made here at Carrooka HQ, we have screen-printed the surface design by hand, using water based inks. The surface has been protected with a top layer of clear wax, which you can easily top up from time to time to maintain lustre.
Jack is yet undecided about whether to make more of these boards. The hours of work involved with shaping each piece by hand, make it impossible for us to charge a price that would cover costs; so it’s highly unlikely that these boards will ever be replicated. We are investigating different production methods to see if we can create similar products in the future, but we have hundreds of different design ideas, so this pattern may never be made again!
But with innovation comes uncertainty! We have not used this patchwork technique before, so while we have used 40 years of capentry expertise to ensure they are solid and smooth, we cannot predict with 100% certainty how the pieces will react in your home environment. With that in mind, we are selling these boards at a reduced price (they should be well over £1000) to reflect the fact that it is a experimental piece. But we can guarantee that if, within six months, you notice any movement in the surface pieces; we will replace the playing surface with a one piece, hardwood plywood surface within the existing hardwood rail, free of charge. If you have any doubts about this guarantee, please speak to us before purchasing.