How I Changed My Darts Equipment

In an earlier article, I emphasized sticking with one set of darts and not changing things out.

I think I said something like “the dart doesn’t matter”. Now I’m going to tell you about how I just changed my entire dart set.

“Liar!”, “2-faced git”, “I knew he was full of it”.

Wait, hold on. I still stand by what I said before but I better say it differently this time:

The darts don’t matter until you’ve reached a certain level of ability.

And even that isn’t quite right because a pro will stomp you throwing Bic pens with pigeon feathers stuffed in the end.

Anyway…..I was messing about with a friend’s set a few weeks back and I kind of liked the feel of them. I was getting really tight groups (though off-target) and I thought I’d experiment a bit.

My old trusty set was 22g, no name, mid-length shaft and teardrop flight. My new set is a 24g, old style Phil Taylor Purists, same shaft and the standard kite flight.

Whew. That’s a lot of changes. Here are a few observations:

The Dart

The Purists are a strange sort of dart. They have a longer barrel than most, a long point, a ton of texture which I don’t normally like and, most importantly, the center of gravity is further back than many darts I’ve used.

What I noticed first when throwing these is that the darts hit the board at with less of an arc (i.e. they stick almost parallel to the ground) That’s a major win I think because they tend to not block the target the way a downward-pointing dart does.

By the way, how the darts land isn’t a factor of the darts, it’s the result of how I throw. Pay attention new guys!

The Flight

If you want to have a weird darts session, put on a radically different flight shape and go play. Moving from teardrops to kites forces me to change more things than I care to mention, but because I’m a very light thrower I am affected more by my flight than the guys who shake the wall when they hit.

Took a while to get used to seeing my darts come in on a different flight path – like someone else was throwing them. I’m still thinking about trying the teardrops on these but I seem to be able to throw these a little harder than my old ones, so I don’t mind the extra drag and I want the stability for now.

The Shaft

I started using these with the really long aluminum shafts they came with (did I mention I bought these used?) but I was all over the board with them.

Not so much the points but the flights would be anywhere from 30 deg. left to 30 deg. right of the point, so I’d obviously added a ton of left/right wobble. Going back the medium shafts made this stop. 

Again, that’s a feature of my throw. If I’d always used long flights I would have corrected this by now, but seeing as I’m not trying to revamp my throw right now, I didn’t want to add another negative mechanical issue to my game.

The Verdict

Still out. I’m gonna keep the darts because being so narrow they do tend to stack nicer. (I threw a T80 the other day and I could’ve fit another 6 darts in the trip-20 bed – they were that tight.)

Still thinking that I’ll play with a the shaft and flight variables some more. I don’t think I can go too short on these – the whole purpose of the slim, long dart is to move the clutter away from the board, but we’ll see. I’m also gonna stick the teardrops on and see what happens.