I have been a bowling center head mechanic in my past. I started in the late 70's and continued to 1990 when I changed careers.

In 1978-80 I was responsible for conditioning the lanes in Miami. I did not setup the pattern but was responsible for running the lane machine. Here is how we did it for our thursday night, 2nd shift scratch league. We stripped the lanes on thursday moring at 1:00am.  Then we oiled the lane gutter to gutter 10ft and buffed to 36 for the am leagues and open play of the day. Then at 4pm, I started the nightly run... we blocked off the oil from applying to the lane from 10 to 10 and ran 5 coats of oil 30ft and buffed to 36. We had 11 300 games that season in this league, it was a 4 game with 4 man teams. High averages were in the 220's and yellow dots were prevalent.

In the early 80's I was given a head machanics position and relocated to texas. There, I actually had my oil tank separated into three pieces. I used the thickest possible conditioner in the middle and the thinest possible outside. We were constantly being preinspected for certification and would pass. But by the the time the 2nd shift started... the outside oil had evaporated and it was a huge tophat. We oiled 32 feet buffed to 38 feet and stripped the backends by hand before oiling.

Later in the 80's tanks we were able to control the distance of oiling the outside independantly of the inside. So we were able to oil only 7 feet gutter to gutter and then 30 ft 10 to 10 and buff to 38 with fresh backends.

My point here, is that no matter what ABC dictated in oiling procedures, we were able to defeat these attempts to reduce the scoring. We learned that top hats catered to short term scoring but crowns accross and down the lane allowed scoring for many and long term.


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