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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