Thursday, December 15, 2005

The Split Atom


This is a new creation from Jeff Pickup. It is a dart that comes apart in the middle of the barrel to allow the insertion of a moving point. Thus the name the "Split Atom". The idea is quite revolutionary and from just looking at the first picture here it appears to be a fixed point dart and there is no indication that the point moves. It is a very clever idea.

This picture sort of shows the dart barrel and point disassembled. You can see that the point is quite long with a knob, or stopper, on the butt end and that the pieces of the dart are split more or less in the middle so that when the point strikes back upon contact with the dartboard, it is slamming into solid tungsten, and not the top of some stem.



And as you can tell from this picture, once the dart is assembled, it is quite hard to locate the seam in the barrel. I am fairly certain that Jeff is using Lock-Tite to hold the pieces together.


If you think you might like to order any of these darts or anything else Jeff Pickup has pics of on this blog, but sure to leave a comment with your contact information and I'd be happy to pass it along. If you contact him directly, please be sure to let him know you saw his stuff on my blog. Cheers! Assembled with Pickup Stems:

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks like Jeff is giving Voks and Balance point a run for their money.

Zeeple said...

Balancepoint only makes soft tip darts (usually - to the best of my knowledge) although I know from speaking with the owner of Orion Vector that they have at least experimented with steel tip weights. Voks has nice stuff, but their El-C mechanism goes all the way through the dart and pounds on the shaft. Seems to me like the Split Atom is a good answer to both shortcomings.

Anonymous said...

Z,
Are the barrels short, or are the tips really long?
Jim

Zeeple said...

Good question. The quick answer is that the barrel is as long as you want it because Jeff does custom work. He doesn't make a dart until it has been ordered and you can specify weight length, grooves rings, shape, etc. But these are his words:

up to 2.150" in 9/32"dia,and up to 2.00" in 5/16". Sample you have seen was 2.00" long X 5/16" dia at the point end. It weighed 21.5 grams as seen

Does that answer your question?

Anonymous said...

That's what I mean, now Balance point has to came up with steel point, and Voks has to come up with a "stopper" so the point does not slam into the shaft. And like you said best of both worlds.

Zeeple said...

I wouldn't mind getting a set of the balance points. I hear they are good darts but they don't do steel point weights.

Anonymous said...

I have had a set of these darts since mid December and they are great. All the guys I play with are checking out the blogs to see Jeffs work. If anyone is going to think of buying darts from Jeff, they won't be disappointed. He does excellant work.Well worth the money!!!!

Zeeple said...

The split atoms are special darts. I remember when Jeff was first designing them he was quite excited and told me he would send me a set so I could give them a test drive and blog about them and what not. But then another dart aficionado from Korea bought the set he was going to send me and I never got a set! Oh well good for Jeff that he made a sale I guess. Some day I might wanna have a set too. Some day.