How To Make a Wine Cork Dartboard

Today I am sharing how to make a wine cork dartboard that I made for our “man cave garage” in Ventura. Not only was it a fun project, but the boys love it!

Every time I share a photo of our garage at the beach house, I get tons of inquiries about our dartboard. Is it made out of corks? Where did you buy it? By any chance did you make it? The answer is that our dartboard is made out of corks and yes, I did make it. Today, I am going to show you how to make a wine cork dartboard.

Before I start my tutorial, there are a couple of things I need to share. First, I made a really large dartboard. It’s probably a bit too big. Although there are a few dart marks on the wall outside of the corkboard so maybe I got it right. 

My wine cork dartboard measures 60″ tall by 40″ wide. It also took about 1200 corks. 

You do not have to make one this large. When you determine your size, you should know that the bullseye on your dartboard should be 5’8″ off the ground. So make sure the size you select allows for the hanging height requirement.

 

Where Can You Find a Lot of Wine Corks?

It’s not likely that you have enough wine corks sitting around the house to make this dartboard. We certainly did not! So where do you find wine corks?

1. You can buy them on Etsy. But I suggest you find them for free.
2. Go wine tasting and ask every winery for extra corks.
3. Visit your local restaurants in town and ask them to save the corks for you for one week. You will not believe how much wine they serve!
4. Ask a local college that teaches a wine course to save them for you.
5. Visit any wine stores or wine bars and ask them to save the corks for you.
6. You should know that all of the corks are not the same size. Some are fatter and shorter. So sometimes you can switch out a few corks to make them fit.

What you Need to Make a Wine Cork Dartboard

• A Dartboard
• One piece of wood, cut in the size of the finished dartboard (I used plywood but our dartboard is really heavy. If you can use a thinner piece of wood I would suggest it.)
• Wood trim for mitered edges
• Assorted wine corks  (the quantity depends on the size of your board)
• Glue gin and lots of glue sticks
• Exacto knife to cut corks

How to Make a Wine Cork Dartboard

1. Measure your board and cut the trim and add the miter edged frame. Attach with a nail gun or hammer.
2. Determine where you want to place the dartboard. I made a rectangle board (although a lot of the ones you can buy are square). I place the dartboard above the centerline.
3. Determine the design you want to use. I got pretty fancy, but then again I have a tendency to do that. Feel free to copy mine! I will mention that once you finish adding corks around the outside of the dartboard, you might want to measure to see if the corks will fit. This may cause you to change your design because you want the corks to fit in the frame.
4. Glue the dartboard in place with your glue gun. Make sure it is straight.
5. As you can see from the photo above, I flipped some red wine corks and added them around the edge of the dartboard. You can add some glue to the side of the corks to secure the dartboard in place. Continue adding corks.
6. Add more rows of corks around the dartboard until you get within the width of two corks of the outside edge.
7. Add corks all the way around the outside edge. I laid them in first to make sure they would fit. I didn’t want to end up with a half cork at the top! At this point, I drew some straight lines which measured the height of one cork across the board. I wanted to make sure my lines were straight and this helped a lot.
8. As seen in the photo above, I started my straight line of corks at the top and bottom of the circle of corks. I added this line of corks AFTER I measured the corks from the top and bottom. Once again, I didn’t want to have to cut an entire row of corks in half.  By measuring first, I knew where to start my first horizontal line of corks. You will need to start cutting corks so that they will fit. It takes a bit of practice, but it doesn’t need to be perfect. It was at this point that I ran out of corks! Fortunately, I had a friend who taught wine classes and she brought me a bag of about 400 more corks!
9. Continue filling in the board. 
10. It was at this point that I realized it would be a lot easier and a lot less painful if I placed the hot glue on the board and not on the corks. My fingers were burned and once I figured this out, everything went so much better!
11. It took me a few days to finish the wine cork dartboard. Aside from the burns on my fingers, it was an awesome project. 

The most rewarding part of this project was the reaction I got from my kids. They were so impressed and happy that I made this.

Of course, that made it worth every second it took me to make this!

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