Target ALX 01 21 gram 90% Tungsten Steel Tip Darts

You know when you’re younger that you do dumb things, well that doesn’t really change when you become more mature (read older).

These were originally offered to me as a review set and I declined them. Not because they were not my style of darts but because I perceived them to be a bit of a multi-coloured misfit. I was wrong, very wrong.

Colours aside the ALX 01 is a great dart. Like many of Targets recently released darts there are multiple styles released under the same model. Visually they have the same colour livery – Purple, Aqua and Black with silver highlights.

The 01 has a classic tapered nose and is centre weighted.

The 02 is basically a parallel barrel with a scallop at the front.

The 03 at first glance it appears to be a 02 without the scallop but upon closer observation the grip layout is very different.

And the 04 a parallel barrel with what looks like a far more aggressive grip style than the other 3.

So let’s look at the ALX 01 – the barrels are precisely 47mm long, 3.6mm in diameter at the point end, 5.87mm at the shaft end and 7.41mm at their widest point which begins about 16.25 from the front of the barrel and continues for about 13mm. It’s a very busy grip profile, that I won’t even try to describe but it’s really well done. If you have relatively soft skin you’ll be able to feel it hold on. The barrels are shipped with Short Purple Pro Grip Shafts and ALX themed flight and Swiss Points are standard. The Swiss points supplied in the darts are Standard 26mm long and Smooth. The ALX 01 looks better in real life as opposed to online images, the look and feel of an intricately machined barrel like these just can’t be appreciated in a photo.

At the Oche, they fly really well. It’s a matter of either adjusting your grip or tuning them to suit your own personal taste. For me, the only change that I made was to put in 30mm Diamond cut Swiss Points mainly because the darts would sometimes fall out of the hard board I was playing on, and I didn’t want to ruin the look of the shiny Swiss points they came with.

Yes, they come with Swiss points! I have to say that there still seems to be resistance to Swiss points. I don’t know or understand why other than people that I ask appear to have a multitude of reasons including they break to easily, they come loose and the list goes on. I’ll be the first to say I am not an advocate for change if its just for the sake of change, but I really think there are some positives the biggest one on my eyes is the ease of swapping out points for any reason. I changed the points in these for the review without removing the shafts in just a few minutes – no bother and no fuss, with the tool that is provided with every set of Swiss point darts.

I really enjoyed the ALX 01 straight out of the box. They’re a really nice barrel in the hand and have a comprehensive end to end grip that will suit players that hold any part of the barrel the grip would rate 3 out of 5 in my eyes. The darts overall score 4 out of 5 in my opinion. It’s a joy to see an innovative Grip profile like the one on the ALX01. They are well balance ads fun to throw; I really like them a lot. And certainly some of the best darts I've tried.