Most people can recall wonderful days of dart playing with colleagues. On a Friday afternoon, before heading home, they’d have beers and enjoy a round of darts.
Darts has always been a popular spectator and participatory sport─and the interest in the game has been fired up by exciting televised tournaments.
Dart Throwers the World Over Talk the same Language
The sheer simplicity of the game of darts makes it attractive to the old and young, and all you basically need is a dartboard and a set of darts.
Dartboards are expensive, as anyone who has shopped around will know. Don’t despair though, because if you’ve got no bucks, you can make a makeshift dartboard to use until you can get the real thing. You may even have bought a dart board package, and found disappointingly, that there weren’t darts included, or if there were, that they weren’t sufficient for effective game play.
Certainly, there are lots of darts to choose from–silver, brass, tungsten and even wooden. Each of these darts has a barrel, shaft, flight and a point of which there are 2 types–a steel-tip and soft-tip point. With the more modern electronic dartboards, you can now also use the steel-tip dart if the weight of the dart doesn’t exceed 20 grams.
Cool Darts without a Hefty Price Tag
If you want to make your own darts at home, there are tutorials on how to make your own throwing darts out of nothing more than paper and tacks. Others can be made with drinking straws or even with pencils. These tutorials come with images and videos so that you can see precisely how each step is accomplished.
For these tutorials on how to make throwing darts, you simply need “lying-around-the-house” things, such as wire, pencils, a hammer, glue, a small screw, glue, a sewing pin or needle, duct tape, scissors, a ruler and a sharp knife. You’re likely to have all these items in your home, and if not, ask the neighbour to help you out.
Ways to Make Throwing Darts
Here are two easy ways to make a throwing dart.
Throwing Dart One:
What You Will Need:
- Needle
- Paper clip
- Black electrical tape
Instructions:
Straighten out your paper clip and make is as flat and straight as possible. Take your ordinary sewing needle and place it at the one end of the outstretched paper clip. Use the tape to bind it on securely, as this is your dart’s point. Don’t use too much tape as then you make your dart too heavy to fly.
Use the same amount of tape at the other end of the paper clip to balance the weight of the dart. Throw your dart. This is literally one of the most impromptu ways to make a dart when you just want to have a bit of practice fun with a make-shift dartboard and primitive dart.
Throwing Dart Two:
We look at another home-made dart you can make from household items –
What You Will Need:
- Drinking straw
- Scissors
- 2-inch nail
- Piece of square paper
- Blu-tack
- Tape
Instructions:
To make the fletching or flight, you can look on the Internet and get simple paper dart flight designs from a square piece of paper to make a simple fletching for your home-made dart. If you are new to the game of darts, you will in all likelihood be confused by the huge variety of shapes, sizes and textures of dart flights.
The thing to remember when choosing and even making flights for your darts is that the variations in flight style serve a purpose, and that making the right size and shaped flights can actually improve your score. Experimentation can help you to make a good set of darts for your particular style.
To make the shaft, cut the straw at the puckered, bend-part, and then taking the longer section, cut 4 opposite slits in one end to fit the flight you have just made. Then,it’s time to insert the fins point-first into the slits of the shaft you have already made. Tape the cut sections of the straw.
To make the head, roll a bit of blu-tack and insert it into the straw. Now, insert the nail halfway into the blu-tack. Use the blu-tack to make a head which you’ll have to test for balance and smoothness of flight and cover the head in something such as electrical tape. Then, all that’s required is for you to hurtle your home-made, colourful dart towards your dart-board, whether home-made or bought.
Final Thoughts
Choosing a dartboard and darts is an important decision as your choices will affect your play. Of course, there will always be a dart selection checklist that can help you make the right choices.
If you’re out of cash and you want to start playing immediately, make your own darts because who knows, this may be the start of you opening up new territories and a world of fun, challenges, new friends and maybe even competitions.
Knowing the rules and regulations of darts isn’t going to win you every match, but you have a cutting edge over others by making your own darts and knowing them well. You can start practicing and learning strategies that will come in handy when playing at the pub or with friends after work or on lunch hour.
Once you know how to make your own throwing darts, remember that the throwing part of any dart is important. Alignment is important and you need to align in such a manner that your hands, elbows and shoulders remain in a straight line. Some people lean far forward while others move back and forth or lift one foot off the ground. However, you shouldknow the basics, and once you’ve developed the correct throwing style, you can benefit from good results.
The most common dart boards and darts are plastic and this is what you may have started out with as a child. If you want to start playing darts now, and the shops are closed, you can still start playing darts on the same day–by making your own.
Darts is such as awesomely social game and if you want to try the game out, learn how to make throwing darts so that you can become part of the dart throwing scene and talk the same language as your friends are talking.