The Making of the Trophy

Our tournament needed an eponymous trophy. Something that epitomised our darting commitment. Solid, weighty and fuelled by beer. This is what CDT lessons were created for. Forget building mini-cars powered by rubber bands, or mis-shapen spice-racks...we could utilise that hour a week in a fully equipped workshop to build our trophy. After some consideration of how the thing should look we decided to just let what natural materials we had dictate the creative process. We had:

- A piece of wood measuring about 10" by 8"
- A single crappy plastic dart, most likely nicked from a pub
- A beer can (empty)

After some deliberation of how best to put these things together, we decided upon mounting the beer can on the "plinth" and then somehow attaching the dart. Simply standing the can would look a little phallic, so connecting it "heightways" was best. Simply gluing would unlikely be robust enough, but trying to screw it on through the thin metal would probably result in it tearing or crunching.

Who came up with the flash of genius is sadly lost in the mists of time; but it was decided to fill the can with plaster of Paris, to give the screws more purchase, and the whole piece a very satisfactory weight. The dart would then be attached to the front with liberal application of the glue gun.

Finishing touch was a small plaque which was engraved to read, unsurprisingly: "The Richard Dunmall Darts Challenge Trophy".

Special mention must go here to a character named Rod Harcourt. He was (and probably still is) a fairly amiable chap who arrived at our school a bit later than most of us. I never got to see him play darts, and don't really know whether he even liked the game, but he did like a bit of CDT. While it's easy now to claim credit for the trophy's construction, I am pretty certain that Rod unselfishly did most of the donkey work for the simple reason that he liked to. He even built a runner's up trophy which was a hand crafted dart made on the lathe, mounted by an angled piece of metal on a small plinth. While the original trophy survives - even if currently stashed in house of one of the player's parents - this second place bauble is universally accepted as lost. It's value now must be immeasurable...or not.


We were now ready to play the tournament.