Contractor Donates Table to Ridgway’s Hartwell Park

RIDGWAY – “I’ve just come from the first hour of hot ping-pong in the park!”

Kuno Vollenweider panted happily into the phone Tuesday evening following the installation of his massive, poured-concrete ping-pong table in Ridgway’s Hartwell Park. “Oh, it plays so nice and so fast!”

Kuno, as he is known, has lived in Ridgway for 30 years during which time he developed a business pouring concrete and selling Greenblock foam construction blocks. He has always had a ping-pong table in his basement. And on trips back to his native Switzerland he would see “all these concrete outdoor tables. I like to play, and I wanted to give something back to the town after all these years.

“There hasn’t been much concrete business lately, so I started designing the forms in February. I made some miniatures first. Then I started on the plywood forms for the full-size table.”

His first try had “some professional booboos” in the technical formwork, Kuno said. The table played great, but the base wasn’t perfect, so he donated it as a prize to the Fireman’s Raffle during the Ridgway Arts and Crafts Rendezvous in August, where it fetched $650.

Kuno’s second effort “has a little more sleekness to it,” he said proudly. He estimates the finished table, which was poured in one piece, weighs about 4,000 pounds. (It was delivered from his storage space on North Cora Street by a very big forklift.) The gracefully arched negative space between the table legs “probably took 700 pounds off the total,” he said. “This is the art part.”

There is reinforcing steel in the cantilevered tabletop. And the super-smooth finish on the playing surface is a result of Kuno’s handwork, known as hard troweling. That’s the “nice and fast” part.

Thinking outside the usual concrete-business box, Kuno hopes to manufacture the tables for parks, schools, hotels, libraries – anyone who wants an excellent-playing outdoor table that doubles as art in the yard. He is thinking $2,500 per table.

Kuno gave credit to Ridgway neighbors who helped with the project, including engineer Matt Hepp, Rico transplant Tom Bennett, who forged the steel end caps to hold the net, and “30-year concrete expert” Donald Branson.

The table now sits, perfectly level, on blocks in the grass next to Town Hall. And that is where, during business hours, players can pick up a net, paddles and balls for free play. In the evenings and weekends, when Town Hall is shut, players can bring their own net and play to their heart’s content.

“That’s the great thing,” Kuno said. “It’s not only public art, but it gets people outside to play.”