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Different Dartboards

Dartboards have gone through many changes in design since their inception hundreds of years ago. If you read my Book on darts you will see how the board started life as a cross section of a mast on a sailing ship or the bottom of an upturned beer barrel. By the 1900s the number arrangement had been settled and regular boards were being manufactured. 
The first proper boards were made of a solid slice of elm which gave a real thud when a dart landed in it. The problem with these boards was that you continually had to take the board down and soak it in water to close up the holes made by the points of the darts. Later on these were replaced by pigs bristle boards which were far superior as the bristles needed no special care. Other materials have been tried for boards and occasionally cheap boards made out of a ring of paper can be seen on sale. These have plastic “wires” and are really only meant for children. However, nowadays a lot of boards are made out of sisal, a type of rope, indeed the boards that the Weston league have provided free of charge to each pub in the league are made out of this. I don’t know if this is a general switch in the trade but perhaps pig bristles are becoming difficult or more expensive to obtain. 
The colour of the dartboard has been consistent with the exception of one brewery that had their own boards made a different colour. Instead of black and white they are yellow and green. These boards seem very strange to play on when you are used to the normal colour arrangement. You can get a similar sensation if you move the wire on an ordinary board round one segment so that the 20 is a different colour. 
The usual dartboard wire is round but better quality ones often have a diamond wire (See article on Diamond wire Boards.) There exists a professional board with narrow doubles for more experienced players but they have never been adopted for competition. Another oddity is the Yorkshire board that has no trebles on it. Scoring on this is done by going for the big 20 every time or taking the risk of putting darts out of the board and going for doubles all the time. There exists a variation on this with the board having a coloured diamond on the outer edge of the board that can be used to score on. Generally speaking though apart from technical improvements the dartboard has remained unchanged in more recent years.

 

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