Bounce-Outs: A Symptom-to-Cause Table for Points, Board and Throw
The sound tells you which department to look in. A sharp metallic ping is a spider strike and belongs to the board's wire gauge. A dull thud with the dart at the foot of the wall is the segment refusing the point, which is nearly always a blunt or burred tip, a compacted bed or a dart arriving nose-up. Diagnose first, because the three fixes have nothing to do with each other.
By the Darts Fella Editorial Team
Listen before you look. A bounce-out that rings — a hard metallic ping, dart kicking straight back down the throw line — hit the wire. A bounce-out that thuds and drops at the foot of the wall hit the segment face and was refused. Those are different problems with different fixes, and treating them as one problem is why most people spend money on the wrong thing.
Wire strikes are a property of the board. No change to your points, your grip or your stance will stop a 1.5 mm round wire throwing a dart back at you; only a thinner spider will.
Face rejections are yours to fix, and the order of blame is points, then humidity, then board wear, then entry angle. Most players go straight to the throw, which is last on that list for a reason.
One number worth having before you start: on a decent board with sound points, a hundred darts thrown at the treble 20 should produce somewhere between one and three that don't stay in. Above six and something is genuinely wrong.
Three sounds, three departments
Get this straight and half the diagnosis is done standing at the oche with your eyes shut.
A ping is steel on steel. It's short, bright and it carries — you'll hear it from another room. The dart usually comes back towards you rather than dropping, because a round wire deflects along the surface normal and that points out at the thrower.
A thud is steel into fibre that didn't take. Duller, shorter, and the dart drops nearly vertically at the wall. Sometimes there's a half-second delay while the point holds and then lets go, which is the same fault with a slightly better point.
A clatter with no impact sound at all is a deflection off another dart. Look at the flights in the board before you look at anything else — a slit or a folded rib tells you exactly what happened.
Symptom to cause, with the test that separates them
Work down the left column until you find your symptom, run the test, then act. The tests are all things you can do at the board in under five minutes with a torch.
What you see and hear Most likely cause Test at the board The fix How long it takes Sharp metallic ping, dart kicks back at you Point landed square on the spider wire Shine a torch across the wire at a low angle and look for bright witness marks along the divisions Nothing in your throw will help. A thinner spider is the only real answer, and a flat blade board removes most of these outright A new board Dull thud, dart drops at the foot of the wall, no ring The segment face refused the point: blunt, burred, or the bed is packed solid Push a spare point into a clean bed by hand. If it needs a real shove, the point or the bed is at fault Replace or dress the points, and rotate the board so fresh fibre sits under the 20 Ten minutes Dart sticks, hangs, then falls out a few seconds later The point buried 3-4 mm and the barrel's mass levered it back out Look at a stuck dart from side-on. A drooping shaft means it never really got in New points. Check the bed isn't glazed over from repeated strikes Ten minutes Dart hits, rotates on the point and falls Arriving nose-up or side-on rather than point-first Film three throws from the side at high frame rate. The nose should be level or slightly down at impact Shorter stem or a smaller flight to bring the nose down. Change one at a time One session Bounces only in the treble 20 bed and nowhere else That bed is chewed out and the fibres are packed flat Compare the 20 bed against the 3 bed under a torch. The worn one looks grey and glazed Lift the number ring, turn the board a segment or two, refit the ring with 20 at the top Five minutes Deflects off a dart already in the board Your grouping is now tight enough that you're hitting flights Check where the point made contact. A flight will show a clean slit or a bent rib Smaller flight shape, shorter stem, or move your aim to the other side of the bed One session Bounces off the wire on one side of the board only Aim drifting laterally, so darts arrive at the division edge-on instead of into a bed Throw thirty at the 20 and mark them. A one-sided pattern is stance, not equipment Re-square the feet against the throw line and check you aren't creeping across it One session Everything bounces after the board has sat in a cold garage Sisal dried out and hardened; the fibres won't part Push a point into an unused bed. A dry board feels like pushing into hardboard Bring it into a heated room for a week and hold the room between about 45 and 60 percent relative humidity A week Bounce-outs started the week you fitted new points Points arriving needle-sharp, or carrying a rolled burr from the box Drag the point lightly across a thumbnail. It should bite. It should not skate, and it should not hook Take the burr off with a dart stone. Don't chase a needle point — it cuts fibres instead of parting them and it wrecks the board Five minutes Run the test in column three before you act on column four. Two of these symptoms look identical from the throw line and have completely opposite fixes. The one people find hardest to accept is row one. If your bounce-outs ring, your throw is not the problem and neither are your darts. A board with 1.5 mm round wire and proud staple heads presents something like three times the obstacle of a blade spider, and every treble you aim at has two divisions running through it.
Row nine catches out more people than it should. A brand new set of points is not automatically better than the worn set you took off, and points that arrive over-sharp will bounce more than the ones they replaced.
Point condition, in millimetres
Point wear is a continuum and it's worth having a scale for it, because 'blunt' means different things to different players. What follows is a five-stage band based on the radius at the very apex of the point, judged under a 10x loupe rather than measured to a thousandth.
A factory steel point is not sharp in the way a needle is sharp. It's a cone with a slightly rounded apex, deliberately, because a rounded apex parts sisal fibres and a needle cuts them.
Stage Apex radius, approximate Under a 10x loupe What it does at the board Action 1 — Factory About 0.10-0.20 mm Clean cone, faint machining marks, no burr anywhere Normal. Bites and parts the fibre Throw it 2 — Broken in About 0.15-0.30 mm Slightly polished apex with a micro-burr you can feel with a nail The best it will ever be. Bites hard and holds Leave it alone 3 — Dulled About 0.35-0.60 mm A visible flat at the tip catching the light Face rejections creeping up, worst in the worn beds Dress it, or plan to replace within the month 4 — Mushroomed or hooked About 0.60-1.00 mm plus a lateral lip A rolled-over lip on one side, or a hook you can see against a straight edge Skids off the wire instead of splitting past it, and tears fibre on the way out Replace the points 5 — Blunt or bent Over 1.00 mm, or a visible bend in the shank Flattened apex, or a cone that no longer runs true to the barrel Bounces constantly and chews the board while doing it Bin it. A bent point damages a good board faster than anything else on this page You're placing a point in a band, not certifying it. Roll each dart on a flat table under a lamp first: a bend shows up as a wobble at the tip long before your eye finds it. Steel points come in standard lengths — 32 mm, 35 mm and 41 mm cover most of the market — and replacing like for like matters, because a longer point moves the balance point forward and changes how the dart flies. If you're replacing points to fix bounce-outs, match the length you took off unless you're deliberately experimenting.
Replaceable-point systems, where the point screws into the barrel rather than being pressed in, are worth the money if you get through points. Target's Swiss Point is the best-known example. They don't reduce bounce-outs by themselves; they just make stage 4 a two-minute job instead of a workshop job.
When it's the board and not you
Four board faults produce bounce-outs, and all four are cheaper to check than to ignore.
Compaction is the common one. The treble 20 bed takes a disproportionate share of every session, and packed fibre stops springing back. It shows as a grey, glazed patch that looks slightly sunken next to its neighbours. Rotation is the cure and prevention both — lift the number ring off, turn the board one or two segments, put the ring back with the 20 at the top so a fresh bed is doing the work.
Dryness is the sneaky one. Sisal is hygroscopic and a board that's been in a dry heated hallway all winter, or in an unheated garage, hardens up and refuses points that were perfectly fine in October. Aim for 45 to 60 percent relative humidity in the room and most of the seasonal complaints go away.
Proud staples turn a wire strike into a wider wire strike. Run a fingernail across the divisions on a cheap board and you'll feel the heads. There's no fix short of a different board.
A bent spider is the one worth checking after somebody has thrown hard at a wire. Sight along the board face from the edge: the divisions should sit in one plane. A junction standing proud will reject darts at that specific spot and nowhere else, which looks a lot like a technique fault until you find it.
Deflections off your own darts
This one is a compliment, which is no comfort at the time. Once your grouping tightens to the point where three darts sit inside a treble bed, the second and third darts are arriving in a space that already has a flight in it.
The fix is to give the incoming dart less to hit. A smaller flight shape presents less surface for the next point to catch, and a shorter stem pulls the flight closer to the barrel so the whole tail assembly occupies less of the bed. Change one variable at a time or you'll never know which one worked.
The other fix is free: aim at a different part of the bed. The treble ring is 8 mm deep and a treble bed runs about 32 mm around the arc, so there's room to put the second dart to one side of the first rather than on top of it. Most players aim at the same spot three times because that's what practice tells them to do, and then wonder why dart three keeps coming home.
What actually cuts the rate, in order
Spend money and effort in this order. Most people do it backwards, which is why they buy a board and see nothing change.
First, points. It's the cheapest intervention on the list, it takes ten minutes, and it fixes the most common cause. Second, rotation — free, five minutes, and it puts fresh fibre under the number you throw at most. Third, room humidity, which fixes a whole category of seasonal complaints and costs the price of a hygrometer to diagnose.
Fourth, and only fourth, the board. A blade spider genuinely removes most wire strikes, and if your tally showed the wire column dominating then this is your fix and nothing else will do. But it's a hundred quid's worth of answer to a problem you should have measured first.
Fifth, flights and stems, if and only if you're deflecting off your own darts. Sixth, the throw. Entry angle is real and worth working on, but it's the slowest lever here and it's the one people reach for first.
Things that don't work
Every one of these is repeated confidently in pubs and on forums, and every one of them either does nothing or makes the problem worse.
- Spraying or soaking the board with water. It soaks the fibre, rusts the staples, swells the disc against the band and shortens the board's life. The old pub habit of misting a board predates modern sisal and manufacturers are clear about it: don't.
- Grinding points to a needle. A needle cuts fibres rather than parting them, which permanently opens holes, and plenty of venues have a house rule against over-sharpened points for exactly that reason.
- Buying heavier darts to punch through. A 26 g barrel arriving nose-up bounces in precisely the same way as an 18 g one. Mass doesn't fix entry angle.
- Replacing flights when the problem is the wire. If your bounce-outs ring, the tail assembly is irrelevant.
- Turning the number ring on its own. Moving the ring without moving the board just relabels the same worn bed as something else. The board has to turn underneath it.
- Assuming a new board fixes old points. A blade spider with stage-4 points still hands darts back, just with a different sound.