Winmau Joe Cullen S.E. 24 gram Steel Tip Darts

Details - 24g Pencil barrel 50.8mm long 6.8mm diameter.

These darts generally speaking aren’t a set that I would usually play with myself.

For no other reason than I find that coloured darts show the scars of war much more clearly and much sooner than plain metal, but each to their own.

The Darts come from Winmau in their themed packaging, mainly in shades of red and black.

The foam tray inside holds the goodies unassembled, barrels in a point protector, flights and stems in their relevant cut outs waiting for assembly.

The darts come with Prism Zeta flights black with red highlights and black Vecta Blade 6 shafts in 34mm short size.

Once assembled they really look the business, looking longer than they are, but for someone who isn’t a fan of coloured darts I think they look great.

It’s a contemporary barrel shape, almost 51mm long; however the grip profile on these is a little bit different. The profile is in 3 distinct sections.

The front section is approximately 19mm long. Its nose is made up of a gently elongated radius, the grip is made up of 5 narrow ‘u’ shaped grooves 1mm wide, between the groove is a 2mm wide band, five bands in total and each band has 6 elongated slots machined into it. The bands have been machined to give a natural silver finish and make the slots stand out the slots are about 2mm long and 1mm wide.

The middle is about 10mm long and realistically is a very shallow scallop with 7 rings cut into it, the base of the rings is coloured red.

The end of the barrel is about 22mm in total, 10mm of which is a 4 band version of the front of the barrel, the last 12 is a smooth section with a red ring at either side bordering the Winmau logo, this portion tapers slightly to meet the Vecta Blade shaft.

I think the strange thing is that the appear a very long dart when assembled but are only about 115mm long without the point 142mm in total, likely due to the predominantly black colour of the darts.

The scallop tends to guide your hand toward a centre grip style, but the similarity of the banding on the front and rear of the dart allow the player who uses a full barrel grip to comfortably and consistently hold the barrel and achieve decent results from the first throw.

It may have been my own perception of the darts or even the way the grip feels in the hand but the darts feel ‘thick’ even though they are merely 6.8mm in diameter.

That’s not to say they are unpleasant to hold or play with, it’s just the sensation I get when I throw them.

The Grip is nice for the want of a better word it’s about a 2.0-2.25 out of 5.0. Running through my practice drills they worked well for me. And in a pinch I could play league with them.

They represent good value for money.

Overall I’d rate them at 3.5 out of 5.0.