Gutter depth

[MUTTS]

Title says it all. Someone mentioned to me that they thought their gutters were too deep.

Any thoughts on ideal gutter depth for my 1/2 scale lane. Width at 5 1/2inches seems good. Gutter material?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Tony

[Ted]

There are 2 dimensions for the USBC flat gutters. The one required to be measured every year is depth at the back of the flat gutters - through the middle of the 7-10 line. It is supposed to be 3 1/2" + or - 1/8". (Or 3 3/8 to 3 5/8" deep.) True half scale would put this at 1 3/4" + or - 1/16".
And the flat gutter next to the pin deck has to be 9 to 9 1/2" wide. The true half scale lane will put this at 4 1/2 to 4 3/4" wide.

The only other USBC depth is for the round gutter - 1 7/8" deep when manufacturered. This part of the gutter ends at the start of the pin deck.
They are always lower than that measured from the lane surface as the side next to the lane starts out 1/2" to 3/4" lower than the lane surface.
The whole idea for a depth along the lane before the pin deck is to prevent the ball from hitting the bottom of a shallow gutter and bouncing over the capping oneo the next lane.
Common width for a round gutter is 9 1/2". But the top of the capping overlapping the round gutter makes a ball use just over 9".

[dberber]

Good question! I had the specs as listed by Ted above before I had the equipment in hand, so I was worried that scaling down the full size specs by half might not work, and in the end I used a mix of scaling and guesswork and it has turned out fine so far.

I'm using candlepin balls with my half scale lane. 4-3/8" diameter I think. So with that in mind...

My gutters are 5" wide, and flat the whole length of the lane. The depth is the same the whole length of the lane, 1-1/2" from the surface of the gutter to the surface of the lane. I guess that makes mine 1/4" shallower than they should be for true scale at the 7-10 line. I leave plenty of corner pins though so it can't be helping me all that much!

Since I went with flat gutters, I thought it would be better to err on the side of making them a little wider than scale so the ball has a little more space to drop into. 5-1/2" might be a little too wide though.

I used 2x4s as the "capping" on the outside of the lane, so the outside depth measurement is 3-1/8" from the surface of the gutter to the top of the capping. So far no one has launched a ball over the capping and I haven't had any problems with the ball bouncing out of the gutters back onto the lane either.

The gutters are made from the scraps left over from trimming my Brunswick Anvilane panels to 21" wide. Saved me having to buy additional lumber, plus its indestructible. I painted the gutters with about a quart of grey Rustoleum enamel using a small roller.

Here's a drawing of what I did... Dangit, I attached two drawings by mistake and one of them has the wrong measurement. Disregard the one that shows 1-5/8" as the depth.

[Ted]

Absolutely nothing wrong with the way you made this. Congrats on a great project.
Don't worry about the end being a little shallow. The USBC specs are scientifically tested and known to not effect scoring one way or the other. Seems you may be finding the shallow limit of the same thing, just scaled.