The history of the bristle dart board

To my knowledge the bristle dartboard has never been made with boar bristles, I may be wrong, but I have never seen one made that way. I know there are places on the web that claim the board was once made of boar bristles, but I checked Patrick Chaplin’s site and he’s a darts teacher. No, seriously, he is the first darts teacher in the world.

The “bristles” are actually pieces of string tied together to form a small bundle. Many bundles are then placed on a wooden base and compressed with a steel ring. The face of the board is then sanded and the stains are added to give the segments their different colors and then the steel or “spider” segment dividers are added. The number ring is put on the outside and that’s it; you have a bristle dart board.

The first one was made by Nodor, which is a bit strange since they were a company that made Play-Doh and they bragged that Play-Doh was odorless, hence the name Nodor. As an addition they made a plasticine type dart board, which was not a huge success, the idea being that you could reshape the clay to eliminate the holes and use the board over and over again. Remember that at that time most dartboards were made of wood.

Then a bright spark got the idea to make a rope dart board and went to Nodor with the idea! This strange idea was shown to be a viable solution and Nodor patented the idea in 1933. The patent gave them exclusive rights to make this revolutionary target for about 20 years and then everyone else joined in making these classic targets.

Now Nodor had more notable competition from WinMau. Now the race was on to produce ever better versions of the original Bristle dartboard; Staple-free portholes and thinner diamond-shaped wire appeared to reduce dreaded ricochets. They also reduced the gauge of the wire used to make the spider, so much so that current boards have 20% or more extra space for darts to hit.

This means that these days all premium tournament boards are staple free and have ultra-thin wire segment dividers. Winmau has his Blade III board and Nodor his Supawires board and now there are also a host of other brands that have increased scoring areas like the DMI Bandit which is totally staple free. All of these developed stapleless portholes and skinny spiders which increase the overall scoring area. The Bristle dart board is at the peak of its development, leading to higher scores compared to the past due to those ultra-thin wires and increased scoring areas.

As for the future of the Bristle dart board, I think it’s still bright as nothing equals the look, sound and feel of a classic bristle board despite the amazing developments of the electronic dart board.