Thursday, September 15, 2005

The Quest for the Holy Grail

Perhaps the greatest aspiration for your average darter is not to master those difficult shots like the Ton-80 or a Deadeye, but rather the assembly of the perfect dart. This is the true Holy Grail of darting in the modern world of nearly infinite options. So the trick now is to break this problem down to its constituent parts and assemble the dart from front to back. Here are the components in order of appearance: point, barrel [weight, shape, texture, material], stem, flight, extras.

What are the options? Points can be fixed or moving, sharp or rounded dull, roughed or smooth, long, medium or short. Barrels, not to be outdone, have many more options. They can be tungsten, nickle-silver, brass, copper or rhenium (gimme a break already). Knurled, ringed, grooved, barbed, smooth, coated or bare. Front loaded, middle weighted, reverse tapered, fat pencil, skinny pencil, scalloped and may be anywhere from 8 to 45 grams. Stems are aluminum or nylon or plastic, short, medium, long, inbetween, extra-short or micro, spinning or static. Flights can be standard, kite, pear, heart, slim, cut-off, delta, combat or spinning. Smooth, dimplex, ribbed and with any design you can imagine. For extras you've got o-rings, stem rings, crowns, flight protectors and add-a-grams.

With all of these options there is a near infinity of possibilities. So how does your average bar room darter assemble a superior, if not perfect dart? And do not tell me there is no such thing as a perfect dart because one of the imperatives of the human condition is that there BE a Holy Grail.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i agree 1000% and i still seaching for the grail

Zeeple said...

Really? I thought you were zeroing in with your 25 gram Great Whites. Take a look at ebay. There's tons of cheap ones out there to try.