Bowling Pins - Ten Up, Ten Down!Bowling pins are an essential element of any game of bowling. The pins are designed to stand on a mid length base, that widens at the middle before tapering off to a round point on top. To some extent, bowling pins look very much like a distorted hourglass. Ten pins are set up at the end of the lane, and then a bowling ball is used to try and knock them all down. Hit all ten with one shot, and that's a strike—and unlike baseball a strike in bowling is a very good thing. The bowling pins are set at the end of a polished hardwood, or nowadays maybe a floor made of synthetic materials designed to look like wood. The American Bowling Congress (also known as ABC, for short) is the governing body that oversees the sport and gives all the specific rules and regulations involving lanes, balls, and pins. Currently, the American Bowling congress allows more than one type of material for making bowling pins, but pins have to weigh between 1.53 and 1.64 kilograms, which translates to between 3 1/3 and 3 2/3 pounds. The bowling pins do always have to be the exact same height and shape. Each bowling pin must be exactly 38.1 cm tall. All pins have a narrow neck that widens back up towards the top, giving bowling pins their unique and distinctive shape. This is also dictated by ABC standards, since the widest part of the pin is supposed to be exactly 12 cm (and is, appropriately enough, called "the belly") and the very base of the pin has a diameter of 5.7 cm. The reason for this is that this design will cause a pin to fall over if it is tilted ten degrees or more. While bowling pins used to be made out of wood, most bowling pins are now made of various combinations of plastics and synthetics. Machines allow the material to be heated to super hot temperatures, then molded into the perfect shape. For those bowling pins still made the old fashion way, the preferred choice is to use maple wood. The reason for this is that maple tends to be one of the hardest woods, but it also has a durability that many other woods don’t. A wooden bowling pin isn’t even actually one piece of wood, but several small blocks that are glued together, cut, shaped, smoothed, laminated and molded. Even with wooden bowling pins, the outside will be covered with a thin layer of plastic, which will then be covered with a thin and special protective layering to increase the life of the pins. The reason most bowling pins are plastic now is because the supply of wood is finite and limited, and the demand for bowling pins is often far greater than what wood could supply. The pins in the ABC bowling championship are known for their distinctive gold color, and are slightly heavier than the normal bowling pins. Bowling pins have also been used by artists to express art work on a smooth finished surface, so even outside of the bowling alley bowling pins have found their share of friends! |
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