Sunday, February 03, 2008

Fun with Fleece

Here is a new dart case I made from fleece. I made this case because I like very slim streamlined cases that can fit comfortably in your pocket. To make this case you just need a little bit of fleece a small scrap of muslin and some needle and thread and optionally a rare earth magnet if you want the case to have a closing mechanism. It helps to have a sewing machine, which I used, but it is not necessary. After all I have done plenty of quality stuff by hand.

Here is what it looks like closed:

And this is what it looks like open but I took this picture before I decided to add a muslin flight sheath:

The magnet idea came later, I was just going to have a folding fleece wallet style soft case but then it occured to me that I could leverage the steel tips themselves to keep the case closed. So I arrange it so that when folded the placement of the magnet is lined up with the points of the darts. The magnet I used is a neodymium magnet hat has quite a lot of pull.


Here you can see that the magnet is strong enough to hold that darts by their points ( and then some. In this picture they are hanging in front of my fireplace.


A close up of the stem side of the soft case: The wallet is long enough that I could keep medium length stems in there if I wanted to but I prefer short stems so I designed the soft case specifically for their length:


Here is a long shot of the entire case open before I sewed the magnet into it's round pocket:


I strted out by not dividing the stem side into three slots, but later added that for its aesthetic appeal. Of course, once I did that there was no longer anywhere to put the flights since it was no longer just a big open pocket. So my solution was to grab a little bit of muslin and sew a sheath for the flights and attach it in the middle of the open case. I thought about doing it in fleece but I did not want to add too much thickness to the soft case when it is folded closed. Below you can see that the muslin makes for a very thin sheath indeed:


I close up of the middle of the soft case:


Here you can see a close up of the barrel side of the case. I designed it specifically for my 23 gram Magnums but almost any dart will fit. I have been thinking about how to do a similar case with angled pockets for GT style darts.

1 comment:

Tommo said...

Nice work and good to see you've got the Magnums. Won't the points of the darts wear away at the material over time? The magnet will keep them still once they're in - I just though when putting them into the case.