Our set routine involves a deck of cards, some special daub, and a breather crimp. It is the policy of Inside Magic to never reveal a secret, so we won’t. If you don’t know what daub is or a breather crimp could be, this won’t be the place to seek help.
On the other hand, if you know what a breather crimp is, you know how helpful it can be. It is versatile, can be easily created during a performance or permanently applied for hundreds of performances. We used Billy McComb’s secret method for the last ten years because we hate to make mistakes and we like the feedback it provides.
That was until last week.
We found a fantastic new (to us) website with well-made steel jigs custom developed to produce impeccably cards. There are jigs to make your own strippers, breathers, ready Mercury card, shorts, punches, snakers, and splitters. We bought the Breather Jig. It is pricey but it was well worth the price and the shipping from Ireland. It is immaculately made, easily configured for your crimping needs and will last forever.
We tried it out on an old, dog-eared deck, a normal deck and then a brand new set of Bees — our deck of choice. The crimp went in quickly and has held through this writing.
You won’t get the feedback you can feel with the McComb method but the crimp is good enough to give confidence with several Charlier Cuts.
So who is the manufacturer of this fine equipment? Eoin (pronounced “Owen”) O’Hare. David Blaine has sung his praises, “Eoin is a master and should be building devices for James Bond.” We agree.
We’ve wanted to produce our own line of Stripper Decks since we were short enough to run under a table and only hit our forehead. We read books about Sharps and Dai Vernon’s use of a broken bathroom window to make them. If only, we thought, if only we could find a run-down bathroom with a broken window, we too could make a stripper deck that would defy the professional eyes of true gamblers. We searched bathrooms around the country and did find one at a gas station just off I-75 but when we went to get our cards we returned to find it was occupied and for a long time. The poor person was having his own problems from the noise we heard — perhaps making his own Stripper deck, we don’t know. We were taught to never linger too long outside a Truckstop bathroom.
But Eoin has thought of everything. He even has a Bathroom Stripper. No longer need we pretend to be considering the various flavors of sunflower seeds whist watching the bathroom door at the Truckstop.
Our next purchase will be the considerably more expensive Stripper Jig. We’ll report back when we receive it. Perhaps a Rounder would be a good purchase too.
Check out Eoin’s great website at The Perfect Shuffle here. It is like a hardware store set-up just for us magicians.
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