I'd heard that about Lowe, it was his concentration that I liked. No playing to the gallery, just darts.Simon Hickie wrote: ↑Tue Jan 02, 2018 4:03 pmI was also a big John Lowe fan in the old days. However up in Derbyshire he is not that well thought of and allegedly was always happy to take advantage of some poor punter when challenged for money. I always liked the look of his darts, but eventually settled on a 27g Maureen Flowers design. My father threw with 39g brass darts, but at 5' 3" he tended to stay towards the bottom of the board.slinger wrote: ↑Tue Jan 02, 2018 3:07 pm John Lowe, a.k.a. Old Stoneface, was my darts hero. I played with the same flights, same weight short tungsten barrels, copied the throw albeit left-handed, was never much good. Developed my own style of throw and got much much better. And that throw is what earned me the nickname, from all those years ago, of Slinger.
Learning down in Kent was a trial too: throwing off 8 ft 6 in with double in and out and no busts.
The toe-line on our Oche (I am in Kent) was always 7 ft 9 1⁄4 in with the bullseye set at 5 ft 8 in from the floor. We only used 'double in, double out' for practice sessions and friendly games in the pub, otherwise it was always straight in, double out and we played the bust rule too. Sounds like you were in a different part of Kent to me.
A mate and I used to play, for about a year, with 10 gram brass pencil darts (he started out with 20 gm brass darts and then I upped, or downed, the ante) for fun. The problem was you could only use them on really good boards or they wouldn't hit hard enough to stick in. Shame, I think we hit more maximums with them between us than any other darts. The other problem was you could only get real feathered flights for them. It was always back to the "proper" darts for matches though.