Bar Top
 

A few years ago, I attended a Tampa Bay Rays spring training game at Charlotte Sports Park. A tiki bar, located in the outfield grandstands, showcased vintage baseball cards. I can’t recall if it was plate glass that covered the cards, or if polyurethane was poured and hardened over them. But I know that I left a beer glass sweat ring or two on the bar surface🙂.

I have a man cave bar that’s just begging for this type of treatment. My concern is whether going the polyurethane route would be sacrilegious :o. The cards would be “lost”, so to speak, forever imbedded in the acrylic amber. It goes without saying, that I’d use lower grade cards.

Has anyone else used this concept on their bar top — or considered it? Thanks.

Pretty easy answer would be that with the advances in color printing an scanning, scan your favorite cards, maybe even paste them on posterboard to more closely assimilate the card, then do whatever you like...pour eurathane or cover with glass.

Most of those cards pictured are fakes or reprints. If you want to take low grade commons and shellac them to a bartop, have at it. Worth more as a conversation piece than as cards.

Second coat of shellac

I have a friend that did this (going the polyurethane route) with the Ted Williams set from 1994. The cards are worthless anyway and it makes a really cool bar top display with players covering multiple eras.

I owned a large pool hall some years back

and we did the epoxy route for one of the bars and put money instead of cards in the bar top...turned out great, the bills looked just like they looked before the epoxy(or whatever it was they poured over them to form a thick barrier between the paper money and coins embedded in the bar

Bar Top
 

Thanks for your feedback guys. I think I’m going to test the polyurethane technique with some junk cards in a small, shallow plywood tray. I suspect that, like with any project, I’ll make mistakes on my first try. I’ve also read that, for some reason, small bubbles slowly appear in the acrylic — and need to be watched for and popped with a needle.

When I complete the final project, I’ll be sure to post photos of my man cave’s new bar top!:)

When we did ours

we used a hair dryer to smooth it out and get bubbles out....don't ask me how, I am allergic to the president of mexico Manual Labor, but one of my arcade techs built it and I remember him down there with a hair dryer smoothing it out and getting bubbles out

I think that kind of top is cool...(let us know how it turns out)