Dartboard Maintenance: Rotation Intervals and Board Life by Hours Played
Rotation is the whole job, and most people do it wrong: lift the number ring off, turn the board one or two segments, then refit the ring with the 20 back at the top. Do that every 6 to 10 hours of play at home and weekly if you're in a league. Hold the room between roughly 45 and 60 percent relative humidity and a good sisal board will give you 500 to 800 hours before the 20 bed gives up.
By the Darts Fella Editorial Team
Boards don't wear out. One segment of them wears out, and then the whole board gets thrown away.
A player at home throws the overwhelming majority of their darts at three beds: treble 20, treble 19 and the 25 ring. The other seventeen segments finish their working life in the same condition they left the factory in. Rotation is the entire discipline of maintenance, and everything else on this page is housekeeping around it.
Do it properly: lift the number ring clear, turn the board itself one or two segments on the bracket, then put the ring back with the 20 at twelve o'clock. Turning the ring alone achieves nothing — it just gives the same tired bed a different name.
Frequency runs from every eight weeks for a board that gets used when someone visits, to every session or two for somebody putting in serious practice hours. The table below keys it to hours rather than to how good you think you are.
Rotation, done properly
Twenty segments over 360 degrees means each one is 18 degrees wide. Turning the board by one segment moves the treble 20 wear onto what used to be the 5 or the 1; two segments moves it further. Either is fine, and rotating by an odd number of segments each time spreads the wear more evenly over the year than always going the same amount.
The mechanics vary. On most modern boards the numbers live on a separate ring that lifts off, and the board sits on a bracket with a central fixing you can slacken. Slacken it, lift the ring, turn the board, drop the ring back with 20 at the top, retighten. Ninety seconds.
On boards with the numbers printed onto the band there's no ring to lift, so rotating the board also rotates the numbers, and you end up throwing at a 20 that lives at four o'clock. Nobody does this, which is precisely why those boards die young. If you have one, at least turn it a full 180 degrees occasionally so the wear moves to the 3 bed and the bottom half of the board.
Two things to check while it's off the wall. That the bracket is holding the board flat rather than letting it tilt, and that the band is still tight — press a thumb into the sisal near the rim and it should feel firm, not spongy.
The schedule, by how much you actually play
Find your row by weekly hours. The life figures assume a quality sisal board that gets rotated on schedule; a budget board runs at roughly a third of these hours whatever you do to it.
Usage tier Hours of play a week Rotate the board Check the points Full inspection Board life in hours of play Board life in calendar time Occasional — a few legs when someone comes round Under 1.5 Every 8 weeks Every 3 months Twice a year 500-800 Capped by age rather than wear. Expect 4-5 years Casual — a couple of evenings a week 2-4 Monthly Monthly Twice a year 500-800 Roughly 3-4 years Regular — practice most days 5-8 Fortnightly Fortnightly Quarterly 500-800 Roughly 2 years League — practice plus match nights 9-15 Weekly Weekly Quarterly 500-800 Roughly 12-14 months Heavy — a pub board in use most evenings 16-30 Twice a week Weekly Monthly 400-700, because the spider takes a beating too Roughly 6-8 months Practice-heavy — several hours most days 30+ Every session or two Weekly Monthly 400-700 Roughly 4-5 months Set a recurring reminder from column three and stop thinking about it. If you're rotating less often than your row says, the treble 20 bed is doing all the work while nineteen other segments sit there brand new. The calendar cap in the top two rows is real and it catches people out. A board that only ever sees a hundred hours of darts still ages: the sisal slowly dries, the band relaxes its grip on the disc, and staples work loose in boards that have them. Past about five years a lightly used board plays measurably softer than it did, and no amount of remaining hours brings that back.
Which means the occasional player's enemy is time and the league player's enemy is hours, and the two of them need completely different maintenance habits. If you're in the top row, worry about where the board lives. If you're in the bottom row, worry about how often you turn it.
Humidity, and what sisal does at each end of the band
Sisal is a plant fibre and it takes moisture out of the air and gives it back. That's what makes a bristle board self-healing, and it's also what kills boards kept in the wrong room.
A cheap hygrometer tells you everything you need. Put it on the wall beside the board, not across the room, and read it in the evening when you play.
Relative humidity What the sisal does What you see Effect on play What to do Under 35 percent Fibres dry and stiffen; the disc shrinks slightly inside the band Loose-looking bed, fibre dust on the floor beneath, staple heads standing proud Face rejections climb noticeably and holes stop closing Get a humidifier into the room, or move the board out of a dry heated hallway 35-45 percent Dry side of workable Board feels firm; darts need a positive throw to bite Slightly more bounce-outs and slightly shorter life Acceptable. Watch it through winter when the heating runs 45-60 percent The band sisal is designed around Holes close behind the dart and the face looks even across all twenty beds Best penetration, fewest rejections Nothing. This is where you want the room 60-70 percent Fibres take up moisture and swell against the steel band Face feels soft under a thumb; the area around the bull sits slightly proud Points bury deep and pull fibre out on the way back Ventilate. A garage or a north-facing outbuilding sits here most of the year Over 70 percent Sustained swelling; the band goes tight and the spider can lift at the junctions Movement you can feel with a straightedge laid across the face, proud staples, sometimes mould at the rim Darts bury and hang, and segments start to lift Get it indoors. Sustained damp is what actually kills sisal boards Swinging between 30 and 70 across the seasons Repeated swell and shrink cycles work the fibre loose Band loosens, the disc loses compression, the face goes soft in patches Life falls off a cliff regardless of how many hours you've played Pick a stable room. Stability matters more than hitting the exact band Read the middle row and aim for it. If you can only control one thing, control the swing rather than the number — a board that sits at a steady 40 percent will outlast one that oscillates through the ideal band twice a year. The straightedge check in the bottom rows is the honest version of measuring swelling. You won't get a meaningful figure with a tape, but lay a steel rule across the face of a damp board and you'll see daylight under it in places where a dry board sits flat. That's the movement doing the damage.
Garages and lofts are where boards go to die. Both swing hard between the extremes across a British year, and the loft adds heat on top.
Pulling darts out without opening the hole
Grip the barrel, not the shaft and never the flight. Twist gently and consistently in one direction while pulling straight out along the line the dart went in. That's it.
What does the damage is levering. Rocking a dart side to side to free it tears fibre laterally, and lateral tears don't close. Do that a few hundred times in the same bed and you've manufactured the crater that rotation was supposed to prevent.
When three darts are grouped tight, take the nearest one to you first and work back. Pulling the middle dart out of a stack drags the others sideways.
And take the darts out. Leaving them in the board overnight holds the fibre open under load for hours at a time, which is a slow way of doing the same damage as levering.
What kills boards that has nothing to do with darts
A board can be rotated religiously and still die young because of where it lives. Six culprits, in rough order of how often they turn up.
- Direct sunlight. It bleaches the sisal and dries it faster than the room does, and the effect is uneven because only half the board gets it. A board on a wall opposite a south-facing window ages in stripes.
- A radiator directly below. The rising air column runs the bottom third of the board several percent drier than the top, and you'll see it as a face that plays differently at the 3 than at the 20.
- Damp external walls. The board sits against the wall and takes moisture from it. Pack it out on a backboard rather than hanging it flush on an outside wall.
- Garage and loft storage between seasons. Covered under humidity above, and it's the single most common way a good board gets ruined by somebody being careful with it.
- A bracket that lets the board flex. If the disc can rock on its fixing, every dart works the band a little looser.
- Darts left in overnight. Slow, cumulative, entirely avoidable.
When it's finished
There's no gauge for this, but there are four tells and any two of them together means you're buying a board.
The treble 20 bed won't hold a dart even with fresh stage-1 points. That's the definitive one. If a new point in a clean throw won't stay in that bed while it stays in the 3 bed all day, the fibre there is gone.
The spider stands proud across a whole segment. Wire sitting above the sisal means the fibre under it has collapsed rather than the wire having risen, and it turns every division into a wider obstacle.
You can see a dish. Sight across the board face from the edge with a light behind it and a worn board shows a shallow depression centred on the treble 20 and the 25 ring.
Fibres come out on the darts. A few strands on a point occasionally is normal. A board that sheds visible fibre every session has lost its compression and it isn't coming back.
The maintenance myths
Darts has a long oral tradition and a fair amount of it is wrong. These are the six you'll be told at the pub.
- Spray it with water to keep it supple. No. It swells the disc, rusts the staples and shortens the board's life. The habit predates modern sisal.
- Turn it over and use the other side. Only ever true of double-sided coiled-paper boards, and they were awful on both sides.
- Oil it, or hit it with WD40. Nothing about sisal wants oil, and the residue stops the fibres springing back.
- Vacuum the dust off. A vacuum pulls loose fibre out of the face along with the dust. Brush it downward with a soft brush instead, if at all.
- Store it flat with a few things on top. Any sustained load on the face compresses the fibre permanently. Hang it, or stand it on edge.
- A new number ring will smarten up a worn board. It smartens up the ring. The bed underneath is exactly as chewed as it was.