I recently aquired a new vanishing birdcage!
There’s a couple of interesting things about this vanishing bird cage. The big thing is that the corners are upside down, the wires are on the inside of the cage and not on the outside.
The corners also feel longer than they need to be, and it turns out that’s a characteristics of YIMKA vanishing birdcages. All of the pictures of them that I’ve now seen have longer corners than most cages.
After a chat with Doug Edwards who is the Vanishing Birdcage guy, it appears that YIMKA made cages with the corners upside down and the standard way. YIMKA also stamped his cages, but not all of them. The cage I have is unstamped, but based on what I’ve learned, I’d say my new cage is probably a YIMKA!
One of the fun things for me is the detective work and figuring out what I’ve just bought!
-Louie
Good detective work from you and Doug Edwards. I actually bid on that cage , but in the end I didn’t want to go any higher after the bid went to over $200 , because I wasn’t certain about what shape it was in mechanically … the tarnish can be taken care of with a bit of elbow grease, but if any of the bag connections were loose I didn’t want to deal with fixing it (for me it would have been a back-up cage . I’m not a collector as such, whatever old props I buy I plan to use, but I do like to have back-ups for any props that I plan to use frequently and are not the type of thing where I can just buy another one easily) I hope it is in good shape mechanically and cleans up nicely for you. I would love to see the Before and After photos.
I don’t know why, but my first thought on seeing this on the eBay listing was “I wonder if it is a Yimka cage?” (and I did notice the non-standard placement of the corners) So that’s very interesting to know that Yimka sometimes made cages with the corners upside down from the usual placement. Ian Buckland swears by the Yimka cages being the best, smoothest working cages. Curious to know how it feels to you once you’ve cleaned it up and tried using it.
The YIMKA cage is interesting. I’ve noticed that his style of cage is to have the corner U shaped bars really long. That gives it a clunky feeling to me as it vanishing. On the flip side, it makes the cage more rigid when displaying it. So it’s a trade off.
I’m lucky that this cage is in working shape and could be used. eBay cages can be hit or miss. A buddy of mine spent way too much on a lindhorst cage and when it arrived it had loose bars (ie would slide out).
Louie
Dang it , I can’t edit for typos … in the previous comment I mis-typed: “but if any of the bag connections were loose I didn’t want to deal with fixing it”. I meant to type “bar connections” , not “bag connections”.