Tag: stripper pack

Magician Finding Card by Touch
Magic Trick Review

A Magic Breather (Crimp)

Magician Performing Card TrickOur 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.

Magic News

New Magic Invention to Change All
Inside Magic Image of Ask Alexander Logo
Alexander Knows Genius When He Sees It

We are nothing if not visionary — which at times, means we are close to nothing.  But when the visionary thing hits us, it hits us hard.  Like a sap to the nugget out of the night.  We don’t know where it came from but we recognize it when we see it in a police line-up.

We were sapped in just this way last night.  We had finished our last show of the evening at the Hollywood Strip near the Spiderman and by the lady that sells some kind of meat with or without a stick (your choice).  We packed up our ventriloquist dummy (face away from the opening of the suitcase just in case) and loaded up our handful of coins to begin our walk down the Avenue of the Stars.

We thought about how people were making zillions off of cool decks of cards with unique backs.  There are cards with old-looking backs, mis-made backs, alcoholic product labeled backs, colorful wave backs to facilitate beautiful pressure fans (which we cannot do and admit so publicly so that no one confuses us for someone with talent), cat backs, dog backs, back of dog backs and others.

But — and this is where the genius comes in — no one has come up with a back that looks like the front of the deck.  It could be all backs of the same card; say, all nine-of-hearts.  Or it could be different backs of different cards like a new deck just on the back.  In essence every card would be a double-facer.  You could have cards that match the cards on the front or cards that are the opposite of the front, or cards that are random with only a few cards matching.  (Our quick back of the Kleenex(r) calculations says that you would likely have two such cards in a deck of 52 but it was a used Kleenex and we stopped calculating at a certain point for hygienic reasons).

Now, the only problem is to figure out what trick would be perfect for this trick deck of cards.

We could do a color change pretty easy, if the card on the back was a different color.  We could do a card to wallet but with two cards in the wallet to match the double-faced card selected.

We could even make a Svengali deck or Stripper pack to do things we don’t know yet.

Maybe we’ll launch this on Kickstarter and rake in the dough or keep it to our own selves and  die poor.

This could be big.