Cammegh

Bill Cammegh (pronounced CAM-ay) started making roulette wheels in 1989; the first one took shape that summer in a garage at his home in Kent. The business he started is still family-run: his sons Richard and Andrew now lead a staff of about 30 from a workshop in Bethersden, Kent. Cammegh says every wheel and display it sells is assembled there, that it designs and makes most components on site, and that it has done its own CNC machining since 2009. Its first big order, in 2001, was 12 custom wheels for Monte Carlo.

Cammegh's manual wheels fall into two groups. The Classic, the French-style Continental (shallower ball track, smaller rotor, deeper pockets) and the clear Crystal, whose bowl and rotor are each one piece of transparent acrylic, have no built-in sensors; a camera system can still capture their results. The Mercury 360 family, launched in 2012, hides four sensors in the rim that read the winning number and send live data to displays and analysis software. The company says its original Mercury wheel of 2002 was the first manual wheel with sensors in the rim.

Mercury options include Random Rotor Speed, patented in 2017, which silently and randomly changes how fast the rotor slows from game to game; LED lighting around the rim or under the cone; and a Mini built at 75% scale, 60 cm across instead of 80 cm. For automated and online games, the Slingshot 2 launches and retrieves the ball with air jets, so players can watch it the whole time. Most models use a hard-wearing Garnite ball track and a rotor bearing the company calls maintenance-free for life, and custom wheels can get hand-sculpted turrets and hand-painted surfaces.