The point puller I ordered from Mueller just arrived last week and I have had some opportunity to use it although only one one set of darts. I am waiting for some conversion plugs to arrive from Jeff Pickup, which is the real reason I got this puller. The puller was half price which I was quite happy about but I suspect the doubled the price before halving it because it was still pretty expensive!
The puller came with two different size allen wrenches. One is for tightening the small block doen on the point to be pulled from (or pushed into) the dart. That one you use constantly. The other allen wrench is much smaller and is for replacing the part that screws into the shaft hole of the dart. The replacement is if you are putting new points on 1/4" threaded darts, of which I have only a few. The whole mechanism came in a cheap plastic dart case.
My first project was to put a set of one inch hypo points on my fixed point megathrusts. When I bought the darts they came with these very long English style points which I wanted to replace from the get-go but never had the means to do it. As you can see from the photo below that point puller was equal to the task but there were two problems. The first is that the point was not straight in the dart. I think this is because the hypo points taper immediately with no initial cylindrical part of the shank. This was easy enough to correct by hand. The second problem was that after a haalf a dozen rounds or so I got back to the oche and discovered one of the darts didn't have a point!! The point stayed in the board. Upon investigation I discovered that the hole had become looser and the points could go in and out by hand. Not good.
So I then decided to see how easy they would be to remove by hand and too my horror I was able to pull all the points out by hand with little difficulty. As well as push them all the way back in by hand. So what I am thinking is that perhaps this particular set of darts I am working with had loose holes and I couldn't really expect the points to stay in with friction and a tight fit alone. So what I did was to coat the points at then end where they enter the dart with lock tight and stick them back in the dart. This seems to have worked as I have thrown a few games with these darts and the points have not come out. It remains to be seen if this device will be useful for anything other than pulling points out of darts. Could be that the points have to be glued in and that forceful pushing is not required.
What you see below is everything that came with the puller except the case which was just a standard dart case without the little crappy plastic molds in it. All in all I am glad I bought it, but I have not used it much yet. Once I have all the pieces I am waiting for I will be sticking carding needles that I got from Dartnut in the the conversion plugd from Jeff Pickup, and then I will have some nice GT mods to blog on.
Saturday, April 29, 2006
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4 comments:
Looks like a pretty good setup. As you have found out you are supposed to use something to glue the points in. In one set I used a dab of super glue. In another set I used some blue threadlock.
What are conversion plugs? Is it to convert a MP dart into a FP dart? Or maybe it is something to make a fixed point into a moveable point?
Thanks for the comment and the tip mcvickj. I have been in the habit of using blue loktite with darts, to keep moving and conv points and stems tight, and now of course you can add regular points to that list.
Conversion plugs are the base portion of a conversion point without the point in it, so you can put your own points in there. There are also so streamlined that once they are in the dart you cannot tell it used to be soft/mp.
At least that is the theory. I don't actaally have them yet.
I've noticed that some of the points on my 3 sets of identical darts are not as true as others. How much of a problem do you think this is, or does it only make a very small difference. I've made sure that the set I use for League matches consists of three perfectly true points by swapping out the bad ones.
Good question Tommo. I am not sure that it makes any different at all but if you have three darts with true points, by all means, make them a set!!
I have heard of people using completely curved points, like for example banana shaped with the idea that when they enter the trip 20 the curvature of the points will cause the entire dart to move out of the way of the triple, thus not blocking it for other incoming darts.
It is a crazy world we live in.
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