Monday, May 12, 2008

Thin Stylish Dart by Jeff Pickup

Jeff Pickup isn't just a good dart maker, he's an excellent dart designer. Just recently he was good enough to send me some pics of his latest creation (although sadly not the actual darts), pics which I could not resist posting here. And while he did not send the actual darts to me the pictures served to inspire my own imagination and now I have a similar set on the drawing boards. These darts were built to order apparently, for someone else.


As you can perhaps tell from the pic above the darts are very thin. Similar diameter to the M3 darts out of Germany, and they are made from 95% percent Tungsten, giving them a 20 gram weight despite their small size. This is increasingly important to me as I am once again shifting my ideal dart around. In league this year I happened upon a short thin barrel, 18 grams, that i have been deadly with. Without a heavy tungsten a short thin barrel can get too light.


The above pic kinda shows how thin the barrel is if you kinda compare it to the thickness of the point. It also shows how the barrel was sectioned with those tiny grooves. If those were ment as a guide for finger placement I can see how they'd be useful but I cannot see using grooves as insubstantial as that for grippage. But you know. Whatever floats your boat. After all I did not commission these.


The Pickup stem is a creation of Pickups to be sure. I have always admired it but I have never commissioned dart to use it until now (or the near future of now). He drills a hole in the back of the barrell, shoves in a tiny piece of ear clearner stem, and this creates the perfect tightness for a removable yet secure push in stem made from one of those wire jobbies you see online. But now as you can see from the dart above he has added a tiny "umbrella" he calls it to protect the back of the barrel from robin hood damage (after all darts do 1d3!). I am looking forward to this feature as well!


Different pieces of the disassembled dart. I'd love to know how much he charged for these beauties. If I find out I'll post it here! If you wanna order darts from him, you can send him an email here to ask about pricing: Email Jeff and ask about prices!

2 comments:

Tommo said...

Another stylish design from Jeff. The points seem to be very long, making them look sllek.

Zeeple said...

Yes, he has a tendency to put very long points in darts. Whenever he makes darts or me I specify that the points be no longer than 30 mm.