Carrom edge bounciness

Question

Bit of background.. I'm not sure if it will help..

I'm planning to build a Carrom board (or Carrom-like board) for my kids. We play a variation on Carrom, but with pool cues instead of using your finger(and a few variations on the rules). The playing surface is also much larger and we use a rubber strip to cause the striker/carrom men to bounce off the edges. We use strictly acrylic Carrom men/disks.

The playing surface will be 108cm x 108cm and is to be 3.2mm Hardboard ("Masonite" as some refer to it), with cut corners- a few millimeters larger than the striker to allow the striker to fit into it. (We have a penalizing mechanic similar to pool when the striker is shot accidentally into the hole.) The 4 sides is to be constructed from Pine and the whole board will get 3 coats of Polyutherane.

My problem is... I don't want to use the rubber strip around the edges to achieve the bounciness, since I've seen traditional Carrom boards with a heck of a lot of bounce! How do you achieve this bounciness? Is this purely an effect of the Carrom men, or the type of wood (hardwood vs softwood/a specific specie of wood etc) being used?

Thank you

Answer 1

It's been more than fifty years since I've played this game, but the board we had (a standard one that came from Sears back when they sold everything) had hardwood edge strips, hard plastic (phenolic?) rings, and the krokinole posts (on the other surface) were the same material attached to the board surface with heavy screws.

There was plenty of bounce, in my experience, whether we used fingers or the sticks (roughly a meter long and 15 mm diameter) supplied with the game set. Friction with the playing surface made more difference, but a quick application of Pledge furniture polish spray and a wipe down with a soft cloth made the (hardwood ply?) board surface slick enough that the rings could be made to bounce from two or even three opposing edge boards.