I’ve had a dart board for a number of years and I always try to hang it wherever I live. Previously, I’ve had it in an attached shed (where you stood outside of the shed and threw through the doorway) and I’ve also had it in a garage. This time I wanted to again hang it in a small outdoor attached shed/outdoor closet thing. It’s attached to the side of our covered patio so you could conceivably play darts even if it is raining out and the shade should help with how hot it can get here.
Previously, I would just hang the dart board on dry wall and if someone missed the dart board I would make them sign their hole in the dry wall. This time I wanted to class it up a little though. I wanted a cork backer (but not a cabinet necessarily) that would catch the darts that missed the board without leaving a major blemish to the wall.
I perused Pinterest for some ideas and came across a design that used wine corks in a radial pattern behind the dart board. I thought this looked really cool and got my wife on board to help. I made the base of the backer out of 1/2″ scrap plywood and made the red frame out of 3/4″ MDF and painted it using some paint left over from my Mega Man X project. I cut out a round plate (from some dense particle board) to raise the dart board off the backer a bit. I cut the circle using a router and a circle cut jig that I made out of some scrap MDF. I also made a rectangular plate for the score board. I made both the round and this rectangular plate ~1″ smaller than the thing they would hold on all sides. These plates helped raise the dart board and score board above where the corks would lie and the overhand of the object would help hide the uneven-ness of the corks right near the plates (if that makes sense).
In starting to think about putting the corks on there I was afraid darts had a reasonable chance of missing the corks and striking the plywood – which isn’t disastrous for a dart but it’s not ideal either. I purchased a roll of thin cork sheet from Amazon and glued this to the plywood face using wood glue as an extra layer of protection.
We had lots of wine corks that we’d been saving for a project like this. We boiled them to soften them up and then sliced them in half to allow for a flat surface for gluing them to the cork sheet. We arranged them to make sure they would fit and then started gluing the corks on – this time using a hot glue gun. Once everything was glued we attached the dart board using a dart board bracket and then attached the score board with Velcro pads as these dry erase boards get worn out pretty quickly and this way we could swap a new one in without much trouble. I also added a little trapezoidal piece of MDF below the scoreboard to hold the dry erase marker.
In hanging it on the wall I had my wife leave 4 corks off the radial design. These four spaces were aligned perfectly to the studs on the back wall. I used the spaces to drive in some cabinet screws and then we put the corks back on top of the screws using Velcro for easy access. I centered the dartboard in the middle of the doorway with the score board sort of off to the side. We painted the wall behind the backer in Kilkenny Green from Sherwin Williams.
