(updated with pictures)
This is my first post on this forum so hello to all.
I will be reviewing the target multipointer tool. In early august, I was in the market for a repointing tool because I wanted to put a set of storm points on my Unicorn Phase 6 darts , Red Dragon Fusions, and my Unicorn Andy Hamiltons.
I quickly became fascinated with the idea behind the storm point because it would immediately make alot of the styles of dart I use much more aerodynamic and would prevent a great many of the unicorn sigma style knockoff darts from having the huge flight catcher lip.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]I live in Washington State, so darts are hard to come by in these parts(dart tournaments are considered illegal gambling by our state law, and bars tend to view sharp objects as a liability). After a great deal of searching, I was able to find one store in Canada,
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], that carried the target repointer. I assumed price($245.00 USD with another $20-30 of shipping) surely must be a sign of quality and I liked the heavy duty look of it. Unfortunately, as I found out both of these things can be decieving.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]When it arrived, it was packaged in a small box, with all of the doo dad's in a bag, and a small card with assembly instructions on it. Really easy to assemble. The only difficulty i had here was aligning the allen screw with the clamp.
For those of you not familar with they way this pointer works, here is a link to the designer demo'ing it on youtube.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]The first set of Darts I decided to repoint were my Unicorn Phase 6, and I had purchased some storm points from the online store
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] . Comically, Neither of the two stores carried both the target repointer and the target points. On the first two attempts to repoint the unicorn darts, everything went extremely smoothly. When pressing the points into the darts You could tell that immediately there was resistance but then it would kind of pop and slide right in.
I was concerned about this resistance but on the back box of the storm points they said they were compatable with all standard barrel darts. Not a problem right? Wrong. On the third phase 6. I noticed the press was slightly out of alignment, and the dart wanted to start bending upward because of this, but I managed to repoint it. Aftwards though, I noticed that the flight thread orrifice had expanded and was slightly wider than the other darts. shaft still screwed in fine, but i was able to see that the barrel was now wider than the shaft and therefore not flush.
For round two I really wanted to try pointing my Red Dragon Fusion darts, because the style just seemed like it would be perfectly complimented by the target storm points. This is where I really started to have difficulty.
Now when you are attempting to remove the point with their clamp device, I noticed you really have to crank that allen screw in tight or the point will slip out. However this became really troublesome with the Red Dragon Darts, because it seems Winmau/Red Dragon use hardened steel tips. A property of the hardened steel is that it is much more brittle. I broke off two out of three tips in the clamp. One of the two tips still had enough of the shank left that I managed to reclamp what was left and still remove it. The other I could not. Fortunately I have two sets of fusions so I borrowed a forth dart and removed the point.
On to pressing the new points in. When attempting to repoint these darts, the misalignment that I observed earlier had gotten much worse. On close inspection, I discovered the culprit. The way in which the pointer was assembled was the cause. When I flipped it over to inspect the play in the angle, I found that the block the press sits in was attatched with four pop rivet like things. The problem was that only two were actually closed off, the other two were left intentionally not. So what had happened was that the two that were not were sliding out of the base causing it to have play and not line up at all.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]To fix this, I had by buddy try to push on the press from one side to keep it inline. No sucess, in fact I broke several of the storm points and completely warped my red dragon darts to the point beyond usefulness.
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[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]Overall,
I would not recommend this repointer especially if you have valuable or expensive darts. I've had more luck repointing darts with a rivet gun, block of wood, and a hammer. Considering the price, and the price of DIY'ing it, as well as the money I lost from two sets of $30 storm points and 20GBP(approx $40) on the Red dragon darts there is no way i can recommend this at all..
After this bad experience, I attempted to contact target directly through their home site at
[url=target-darts.co.uk]target-darts.co.uk[/url]. However they never responded. I am sure it is possible that my email went to their spam folder or they thought I was trying to get a free ride.
Then I wrote the store
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Intitially I got the impression that they may have been some one skeptical "We have been selling them a while and have never gotten any complaints from out customers". However, through all of their emails have been
very apologetic and polite. They told me they would have to contact the distributor and would have a reply in a single week. Something that never happened. I inquired at the end of the first week and did not recieve a reply, and inquired again at the end of the second week. Their response to this was that they were still sorry,
but were waiting for the distributor to contact the target in the UK. While I do appreciate their do diligence, as a big box super store manager myself, I feel that
they should've just resolved it at store level with some sort of immediate action whether it be credit/refund/compensation(which I asked for but was never mentioned in their replies). It seems I will be waiting probably a month or more....
Overall I
might do business with them in the future, but I would overall would only give them one thumb up for their nice website, interesting selection and expediant shipping, and one thumb down for their inability to quickly resolve customer service issues
