coin magic – Page 2 – MagicShow.Tips

Milk Caps Across…

One thing that drives me nuts is when a magician will post a picture to social media of a craft store and say something like, “I could make so many magic tricks here” but then they don’t say what they made. These are people who are lazy and want to appear creative without doing any of the actual work. It’s not hard, but something that’s visually interesting and figure out a trick with it.

When I was performing last month in Casa Grande, AZ I went to a few junk shops. I’m normally looking for things for my oddity collection, but sometimes I find props to use with magic. One of the shops had about a dozen vintage milk caps.

Milk caps were used in the early 1900’s to seal bottles of milk. These are made of cardboard and slightly larger than a silver dollar, but about one third as thick. These were stuffed into the neck of a glass milk bottle. They didn’t create an airtight seal, but they did keep out debris and bugs.

The size of milk bottle caps lend themselves to coin magic. I’m sure in the 1990’s during the POG game’s popularity, tons of magicians used them. I had the idea of using them for some platform style coin magic, and figured I’d give it a try at a virtual magic meeting the other night:

I think it went well for a first run, now I need to write a routine for it and some jokes and I’ll be up and running!
-Louie

Erasing Memory…

Sometimes playing with an idea without a real goal in mind will lead to something unexpected. Originally my first idea using and SD card was pen thru SD card (pen thru bill). That’s really an unoriginal idea, it’s just putting the pen thru something unusual, but doesn’t really contribute anything to the effect.

Well, last night I came up with an idea, where the effect is essentially pen thru SD card, but different. Here’s what I came up with:

From a creative standpoint it’s a much more interesting solution to penetrating the SD card with another object. This effect was inspired by the Flexible Mirror trick and the old Paper Coin Fold trick. Method wise, it’s different from the Paper Coin Fold, which was fun to figure out. The shape of the SD card makes the method work, where if it was done with a coin, you really couldn’t do the move. Sometimes changing the prop will open the door to a new method and that’s why play is an important part of creating!
-Louie

Memory Magic…

This morning I was doing the writing I do in the mornings and started playing with the idea of using an SD card for magic. I quick Google search makes it seem like no one has really worked on much with them. The SD cards are essentially coins, with them being about the diameter of a half dollar.

My initial idea was to do a Pen Thru SD Card as all of the props are related at office things. There’s really no new territory to explore there, it’s either a gimmicked pen or SD card and a pretty basic idea. However that idea got my brain going, so it did have its place.

One of the ideas I liked was having a 32 gb SD card, magically split it into two 16 gb cards, then finally split one into two 8 gb SD cards.

Another idea was doing a color changing SD card or a transposition with one black and one blue card.

Then I started thinking about making novelty SD cards with my 3D printer. Since they are essentially plastic, it would be easy to make a jumbo one, or a stretched one, or whatever.

Well…I have something new to play with.

-Louie

Tooth Fairy Magic…

The other day I had a strange idea. I wanted to do a transposition between a tooth and a quarter. Using the toothfairy as presentation hook is a no brainer for this. The challenge was that I wanted one of them to be held in the spectator’s hand and obviously they are very different shapes.

The solution finally hit me, why not hand them a folding coin that was folded in thirds? This will have roughly the same shape as a tooth, and have some textures like a tooth. Once that was figured out, the rest of the mechanics were pretty simple. Here’s me trying it out:

It works! This was a great solution for strange problem.

– Louie

Googly Eye Magic…

In my daily writing that I do in the morning, I was brainstorming some ideas using Googly Eyes. One of the tricks that I came up with was essentially a spellbound using a coin an a googly eye. The kicker would be the coin ends up inside of the eye where the black googly part would be.

One of my thoughts was that maybe I should do it with a signed coin. I ended up discarding this idea. The main reason I got rid of the idea of a signed coin was that if the coin changes to the googly eye, then it should still be signed. Well…it should be signed if we’re trying to prove it’s the same coin. Logically if we’re magically transforming it to something else then the signature doesn’t have to be there.

I think magicians get hung up on having things marked, where I think that non magicians don’t need it as much as we think they do. YES, there are times when it makes the trick stronger, like bill to lemon. An ambitious card with a borrowed deck doesn’t. Usually an ambitious card with your deck doesn’t need to be signed.

Now for the next part, which is when the coin appears inside the googly eye, should the whole coin appear inside of it? That’s the thing, if the outside of the eye is still there, then shouldn’t the coin that is replacing the black part inside just be the inside of the coin?

I do have a coin that’s just the center copper part of a half dollar. That would be what would make the most sense inside of the googly eye.

Is that too much logic?

Probably.

However all of that thinking gives me a more unique trick!

-Louie

Folding Nickels…

A little bit ago I came across someone selling a used folding nickel.

It turns out they have two of them:

The one with the straight cut appears to be more homemade and the profile cut seems to be a more professional job. With the nickel being soo small, I don’t know why you’d need it to fold into more than one piece, unless it’s to hide the cut. It appears the one with the straight cut, the cut goes around the building on the tails side to hide the cut.

I honestly have no idea what you would use it for. I checked and a nickel won’t got into a bottle, so you could use it for that, but the effect won’t have nearly the impact as a doing it with a quarter or half dollar.

A quick google search didn’t bring up any listings for anyone selling these folding nickels, so the may be something that someone made a batch of and never sold.

I kind of want to buy them and try to figure out a trick to do with them. If you have any ideas beyond coin in bottle and coin through ring, let me know!

Challenges Extracting Silver…

I’ve been working on this Silver Extraction coin trick style routine at the fair this week. I’ve learned a lot. First of all, I think the more complex method I’ve come up with to switch the coins, has some advantages over simply doing a shuttle pass. A shuttle pass is a solid method for doing the trick, however the advantage of my complex method is that I can hold the coin more openly after the switch.

One of the problems I’ve encountered working on this is getting the shell to stick to the magnet on the lighter. The solution was simple, I added a second magnet to the lighter and some more shim steel to the shell coin.

Having more magnets and more steel to grab solved the problem. The lighter really firmly attaches to the coin.

Another thing that I’ve learned about the trick is that I need to call attention to the three layer of the coin. Most people have noticed the layers, but never really thought about them. The trick has been getting great responses from the people at the fair this week. I really like how strange the trick is.

More Silver Extraction…

Yesterday I started messing around with the Silver Extraction coin trick. Traditionally how the trick goes, is you give them the coin that they hold in their fist. You then pull the silver (silver blob) through their hand and they are left with a clear coin. I think the pulling through the hand is fun, but I think this particular set of coins has a different effect possible.

here’s the idea:

I like the visual of the shaking and having the silver blob sliding around on top of the copper center of the coin. Method wise, I’m not sure it’s an improvement over just a shuttle pass. I’ll be trying out both methods today at the fair.

-Louie

Silver Extraction…

Many years ago when I was working at Market Magic Shop, I used to demo and sell a trick called Silver Extraction. The effect is you take a half dollar and it ends up turning into a blob of silver and a clear coin. Then at some point someone made a coin that was just the copper center of a half dollar. I don’t know what the routine was, but I’m going to assume it was a similar effect.

I always thought it would be great paired with the blob of silver that came with the Johnson Silver Extraction. Unfortunately they stopped making the Silver Extraction a long time ago, so that was something I never did. Well, recently I came across one of the blobs of silver and bought it.

Now that I have the two of them, I can try it out!

-Louie

Coinistry!!!

The other day after the magic garage sale and we went out to jam at a local bar, we were talking about coin tricks. I brought up the Perpetual Motion Coin Myth from Paul Harris’s books. This is a coin flourish where you hold a coin sideways between two other coins and get the center coin to spin.

I’ve never seen or met anyone who could do it, but we started playing with it and now I’ve done it and seen it done!

That got me thinking, the next branch of magic is going to be COINISTRY! That would be fancy flourishes with coins! Start practicing now!