Sisal, Bristle and Electronic Boards Compared on Density, Wire Gauge and Bounce-Outs
Bristle and sisal are the same board. Both words describe compressed sisal fibre banded in steel, and every 'bristle' board sold today is a sisal board. The genuine fork is sisal versus coiled paper versus an electronic plastic-segment board, and the properties that decide it are fibre grade, the width of wire presented to the point, and how much noise the thing makes at three metres.
By the Darts Fella Editorial Team
There is no sisal-versus-bristle decision to make. They're the same object. A bristle board is a disc of sisal fibre bundles stood on end, compressed under serious load, wrapped in a rolled steel band and fitted with a wire spider. The word 'bristle' is a hangover from the pig-bristle boards that preceded sisal in the 1930s, and it stuck to the marketing.
The choice you actually have is between that construction, a coiled-paper board, a cork board, and an electronic plastic-segment board that takes soft-tip darts. Those are genuinely different objects with genuinely different failure modes.
Short version: hang a sisal board with a flat blade spider unless you need automatic scoring and can't have steel points in the wall, in which case hang an electronic one and accept that you're throwing a different projectile. If you want scoring without changing the darts, there's a third route that most people don't know about, and it's at the bottom of this page.
What's actually inside a bristle board
Sisal is a leaf fibre from Agave sisalana. The bundles are cut to length, stood vertically, and pressed into a disc so the dart enters end-on between fibres rather than cutting across them. That's the whole trick: the fibres part, take the point, and spring back when it's withdrawn. A well-made board closes its holes to the point where you can't see where the last hundred darts went.
Grade matters more than any other single input. East African sisal — Kenyan and Tanzanian — is the long-fibre grade with the least variation in it, and it's what the expensive boards are made of. Shorter, blended or lower-grade fibre gives you a board that packs down instead of springing back, and the treble 20 bed turns grey and glazed inside a few months.
You can't inspect fibre grade through a box, but you can weigh the thing. A serious 18 in sisal board runs roughly 5 to 6 kg. A budget one is often 3 to 4 kg for the same external dimensions, and that missing mass is compression that isn't there. Board mass is a crude density proxy and it's the only one available to a buyer.
The geometry is fixed by regulation regardless of price: 340 mm across the scoring area from double ring outer edge to double ring outer edge, about 451 mm overall including the unscored moat and the number ring, and typically around 38 mm thick.
The spider, where most of the difference lives
The wire matters more than the fibre for one specific outcome: whether a dart that lands on a division stays in the board. A point arriving at a 1.5 mm round wire meets a curved steel surface wider than the point itself and gets thrown straight back at you. The same point arriving at a 0.15 mm flat blade meets almost nothing and slides into one bed or the other.
Spider type Wire profile Width presented to a point How it's fixed What a dart landing on it does Where you'll find it Thick round staple wire Round section About 1.3-1.6 mm Stapled through the sisal at every junction, staple heads sitting proud Deflects hard and squarely. This is the classic ping followed by a dart on the floor Budget imports and older club boards Thin round staple wire Round section About 0.9-1.2 mm Stapled, heads countersunk or concealed Still deflects, but a nose-on point has a fair chance of sliding off into a bed Mid-price sisal boards Triangular or knife-edge wire Triangular, apex facing the thrower Roughly 0.3-0.5 mm at the apex Stapled, or seated into a moulded locating ring Splits the point off to one side most of the time Mid to upper sisal boards Flat blade wire Rolled flat strip, standing edge-on Roughly 0.1-0.3 mm at the strike face Seated in a locating ring, no staples in the scoring bed at all There is barely anything to hit. Most darts that would have bounced go in Winmau's Blade series and the equivalents from other makers Removable lift-off spider Usually flat or triangular As the profile it uses Held by a retaining ring instead of staples Same as the profile, with the bonus that a bent spider is a replaceable part rather than a dead board Boards marketed as staple-free Moulded plastic ribs Rectangular rib between holes Roughly 1.5-2.5 mm of rib Moulded into the segment sheet A soft tip that lands on a rib skids into a hole or falls out. Nothing splits the point because there's no edge Every plastic-segment soft-tip board Column three is the number to shop on. Everything else about a board can be excellent and a 1.5 mm round wire will still hand darts back to you all evening. Staples are the other tell. On a cheap board the staple heads sit proud of the sisal, so the effective obstacle is wider than the wire itself and the dart has two chances to be rejected. Staple-free construction is worth more than a small step up in fibre grade.
The constructions, measured against each other
Two of the columns below deserve a caveat before you read them. Bounce-out rates are the bands players land on when they actually sit down and tally a hundred darts, not a laboratory figure — throw quality moves them as much as the board does. Noise figures are A-weighted bands at three metres of the sort a phone meter will show you, and the peak is what carries, not the average.
Everything else in the table is construction, and construction doesn't move.
Construction Material and grade Board mass (density proxy) Wire at the strike face How deep a point buries Bounce-outs per 100 darts Life in hours of play Impact noise at 3 m Premium sisal, flat blade spider East African sisal, heavily compressed, rolled steel band About 5.0-6.0 kg for an 18 in board 0.1-0.3 mm Roughly 10-15 mm into the fibre Around 1-3 500-800 with disciplined rotation Low thud, roughly 50-60 dB Mid sisal, round staple spider Mixed-grade sisal, steel band About 4.0-5.0 kg 0.9-1.3 mm Roughly 8-13 mm Around 3-6 300-500 Low thud with the odd ping, roughly 50-60 dB Budget sisal, thick wire and proud staples Short-fibre or blended sisal, light band About 3.0-4.0 kg 1.3-1.6 mm plus staple heads Roughly 6-10 mm Around 5-10 100-250 before the 20 bed is finished Thud plus wire ping, roughly 55-65 dB Coiled paper Kraft paper rolled and stood on edge About 2.0-3.0 kg Usually thick round wire Roughly 5-8 mm, and the paper crushes rather than parts Around 6-12 30-80, and the holes never close Sharper crunch, roughly 55-65 dB Cork Compressed cork sheet or blocks About 1.5-2.5 kg Thin wire or painted divisions only Roughly 4-8 mm Around 8-15 once it's holed through 20-60 Soft, roughly 45-55 dB Electronic plastic segment, soft tip Moulded nylon or ABS segment sheet over a contact matrix 3.0-7.0 kg for the whole unit including electronics 1.5-2.5 mm of rib between hole centres None. The tip enters a hole; there's no bed to bury in Around 4-8, most of them registering as no-scores rather than true bounce-outs 300-600 before a segment set needs replacing Sharp click plus rattle, roughly 60-70 dB, and then the speaker Electronic sold as steel-tip capable Reinforced plastic, thicker ribs Similar to the above 2-3 mm Minimal Around 8-15 Short. Steel points split moulded segments, whatever the box says Loud crack, roughly 65-75 dB Sisal board plus camera autoscoring Row one or two, entirely unchanged Unchanged; the cameras hang off the surround Unchanged Unchanged Unchanged Unchanged Unchanged, plus a faint hum from the lighting ring Rows one and six are the real fork. Read them against each other, then use rows two to five to work out how much board you're giving up to save money. If a board you're looking at matches row three or four, it's a year's board at best. Coiled paper and cork are the two to walk past. Neither closes its holes, so both develop a visible crater at the treble 20 within weeks, and once the crater is there the dart has nothing to grip. They exist because they're cheap to ship, not because anyone prefers them.
The soft-tip row carries a distinction worth understanding: most of what looks like a bounce-out on an electronic board is the dart failing to hold in the hole for long enough to register, or holding but registering the neighbouring segment. It looks like the same problem and it has a completely different cause.
Counting your own bounce-outs
The rate in the table is only useful if you know where you sit on it, and that takes about twenty minutes.
Throw a hundred darts at the treble 20 in blocks of three. Tally every dart that doesn't stay in the board, and split the tally into two columns by sound: a metallic ping is a wire strike, a dull thud is the face refusing the point. Do it again a month later with the same darts.
If the wire column dominates, you have a board problem and no amount of fresh points will fix it. If the face column dominates, look at the points and the humidity before you look at anything else. If the two columns are roughly level and the total is under three, you're fine and you should stop counting and go and practise.
Noise, and the flat problem
Those dB bands are close to useless on their own, because the thing your neighbour objects to isn't airborne noise. It's structure-borne. A dart landing on a board that's screwed directly to a party wall puts an impulse into the plasterboard, the plasterboard puts it into the studs, and the studs put it into the room next door as a knock. Nobody hears the sisal. Everybody hears the wall.
Which means the fix has nothing to do with which board you buy. Mount the board on a backboard, and mount the backboard so it isn't rigidly coupled to a shared wall — foam or rubber pads behind the fixings, or a free-standing frame that touches the floor rather than the wall. That single change does more than swapping a steel board for an electronic one.
The loudest single event in a game of darts is a dart hitting a hard floor after a bounce-out. It beats the board impact by a wide margin and it happens at the worst possible time of night. A mat under the board handles it.
On the electronic side, the speaker is usually the complaint and it's usually mutable in the settings. The segment click is sharper than sisal but shorter, and it carries less through a wall because the plastic housing decouples it.
What electronic buys you, and what it charges
Automatic scoring is the reason to buy one, and it's a good reason. So is a wall that never sees a steel point, which is the real argument in a rented flat or a house with small children.
The cost is that you are no longer throwing the same object. Soft-tip darts are marked by the mass of the complete dart, not the barrel, so a 20 g soft-tip set and a 20 g steel set have nothing in common. Plastic tips break constantly and get bought by the hundred. And the target itself is coarser: the scoring geometry is defined by a grid of holes rather than by wire, so a dart that nudges over a rib registers the neighbour.
Regulation throw distance is different too. Steel tip is 2.37 m from the board face; soft tip is 2.4384 m — eight feet flat. Board height doesn't change. If you practise on one and play the other, you're practising at the wrong distance.
Segments wear out, and they're a consumable. A set lasts a few hundred hours and then holes elongate, tips stop holding and the no-score rate climbs. That's replaceable, which is more than can be said for a chewed sisal board, but budget for it.
Camera scoring on a sisal board
Almost nobody hanging their first board knows this category exists. Camera-based autoscoring systems — Scolia Home is the best-known — mount around a normal sisal board, watch the surface, and score the game automatically. You keep the steel darts, the sisal, the throw distance and the feel, and you get the scoring.
For a player who wants a machine because scoring is tedious rather than because steel points are a problem, this is the answer, and it's the option that gets skipped because the question is usually framed as sisal or electronic.
It isn't free of compromise. Lighting has to be consistent, the setup takes an afternoon, and stacked darts still confuse it occasionally. But it doesn't change what leaves your hand, which is the thing an electronic board cannot say.
What we'd hang, and where
For a flat with neighbours: a sisal board with a flat blade spider, on a backboard, decoupled from the wall, with a mat underneath. The noise problem is a mounting problem, not a board problem, and solving it that way means you're still throwing steel.
For a house with small children and a wall that matters: electronic. The steel-point risk isn't worth the argument, and the built-in cricket variants earn their keep.
For anyone in a league: sisal, blade spider, rotated on schedule. Practising on a board that plays differently from the one you compete on is a slow tax you pay every match night.
Skip coiled paper and cork outright. Skip anything marketed as steel-tip-capable electronic — it's the compromise that fails at both jobs.