Saturday, November 7, 2009

Air Hockey Puck

If you've stayed at Smoky Mountain Tower recently, you know that the air hockey game has been unavailable. Our game table is a combination - offering both air hockey and foosball. The air hockey part works with a special "hover puck." It's that little thing in the center of the table on the picture below.



This hover puck has a little motor in it that supplies the air, rather than the larger tables that have air coming up through the table. The motor has a rechargeable battery in it that gets its charge from a plug-in charger.

The problem with this puck is that it can't be left on charge more than 3 hours. It appears that somebody didn't follow the directions and overcharged the puck, which blew the motor. As soon as we found out about it, we ordered a new puck from Sportcraft (the manufacturer). We thought we'd have it back in a week or so, which would have fit our timing because we could have brought it over to Gatlinburg.

But Sportcraft took more than 6 weeks to get us the puck - and then sent us the wrong thing! I think we've got it worked out, though. They're overnighting me a new puck and charger, which I should have on Monday. We're going to meet some folks from Gatlinburg on Thursday and we'll ask them to take it back. So we're hoping everything will be up and running again by next weekend.