Bob - further to Carl's note about Nella-sealing the courts and doing the disks, I have added my memories of disk-sanding below. If you remember any additional or different details, please chip in.
I remember the names of some of the gents that helped do the disks - Bob Finta (instigator), Phil Wade, Charlie Jones, Felix Piscitelli, Joe Shebester, and yours truly.
Some background: After getting new disks and our courts newly refinished in time for the Mayor's Tournament February 6/7 2010, we found that the new disks were inconsistent in speed, and the courts would not hold beads for much more than the play of one game. This was in spite of the fact that the disks were supposedly "seasoned" at the factory. A ND tournament using the new disks made it clear there were problems on many courts that had not been noticed during regular daily play - loss of beads from the court-centers, and inconsistent disk speeds. Many ideas and opinions were offered, but after some careful though a few of us agreed that the disks were at least partly to blame, and that for our smooth courts, the disks should be almost flat on the bottom, not concave (dished). We believed that the dish-shape was actually pushing beads away from the most-travelled center area of the courts. Certainly, given that we did not know for sure if the problem was due to the courts or the disks, it was much much easier to fix the disks.
Bob Finta and I had observed that the old disks seemed much flatter on the bottoms than the new ones. We then took one set of new disks and tested them on a court, finding two were noticably slower than the others, both on black and on yellow. We then sanded all of them them all as flat as we could and tested them again. After the sanding, they were much more consistent compared to each other, with the previously slower ones seeming to run faster. (Although we had no measuring device other than a stop-watch). We tried another set, and again noted a difference in speeds, sanded and re-tested. The second set of disks were more consistent and ran as well or better after sanding. We decided to invest an afternoon's work to sand the rest of the new disks nearly flat on the bottom in order to at least make them run at a consistent speed.
For historical purposes and information to others, here's some detail (as I remember it): We got some volunteers together so the job could be done in an afternoon (estimated). There were still 18 sets to do, with 8 disks each, making 144 diisks - If each disks could be done in one minurte, the whole lot would take under 3 hours. With the objective of flattening the bottoms of the disks, we organized an assembly line. Working on the picnic tables behind the cue-house, we first used very course "drywall" paper tacked face-up to a piece of plywood, placed on a picnic table. Each disk was worked bottom-down on the sandpaper, rubbing firmly by hand for about 10 seconds, then given a quarter-turn and re-sanded and turned repeatedly until the bottom appeared almost flat. This took a minute or more on each disk. It was fairly hard work and produced lots of dust which had to be carefully dumped off the sandpaper. The disk was then passed to the next station where the heavy scratches from the course sandpaper were removed using medium-grit (300) paper, also tacked face-up to a piece of plywood. We were able to have two people working at flattening, and two people on smoothing, so we were processing disks at better than one per minute. However there were other operations to take care of such as unpacking and repacking and re-storing the boxes of disks. Plus, when someone's arm got tired of sanding, they took to testing some disks to make sure the speeds were still consistent. We had also tested and found that the disks ran fast enough after the medium-grit sanding, so furtunately we did not have to invest more time in a final sanding with fine-grit paper. In all we mamaged to process the complete set of new disks for 18 courts in about 2 1/2 hours.
Conclusions:
1) Sets of disks should be tested for consistent speed within each color in a set.
2) Sanding makes for consistent speed.
3) Disks do not have to have an absolutely smooth (mirror finish) to run well.
What we suspect but did not yet prove:
1) Dish-bottomed disks push beads off a smooth court much faster than flat-bottomed disks. (Testing of one vs the other is now impossible as we have no more disks that are dish-bottomed. From a pragmatic viewpoint, careful observation while the now flat-bottomed disks are in normal use, should give us the answer as to whether the flat-bottom disks are satisfactory.)
Cheers, Bill boyes.
