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!
A couple of days ago I posted about a new vanishing birdcage. It was sold to me as a Sherms Vanishing Bird Cage. It turns out it’s a Warren Simms Vanishing Bird Cage!
Thanks to the super knowledgeable Doug Edwards! He also informed me that the “T” stamped on mine meant it was sold through Tannen’s Magic in New York.
Over on TikTok I post a lot of videos of vintage magic trick and a recent one was of my Milson Worth Silk Cabby. There are two ways I do these videos. The first is EXACTLY how the instructions say, then if I don’t have the original instructions, I try to add a little bit to the the basic function of the trick.
So the trick has a little bit of a routine, besides the standing production. It’s got three vanishes and then the kicker ending. I was trying to maximize how much I could get out of the Silk Cabby beyond just a production of a lot of silks.
A couple of months ago I got a Leon’s Improved Glass Penetration by Merv Taylor.
It appears it should have a dozen spikes, plus two hooked spikes, and mine only came with six. Five regular spikes and one of the hooked spikes. These are something that was custom made for the trick, so it’s not something I can just go to the hardware store and buy.
This is where my 3D printer comes in handy. I designed a replica of the spike and printed it out!
The test one came out great, now my next step it to print out a full set of them! I do still need to try to create the hooked spike. I’d like the set to match.
Recently I had a magician reach out to me to let me know there were some vanishing bird cages in a magician’s estate. I didn’t have much information to on as to what one of the cages was.
Obviously one of them is a Milson Worth Silver Meteor vanishing bird cage. This one is cool, because I’ve owned dozens of Milson Worth cage, but never had the instructions, until now!
Now for the interesting cage, the one that’s not clear as to who made it. There wasn’t a lot of information that I could pull from the pictures, so I totally took a gamble when buying it.
Here’s the cage:
It looks a lot like my Owen Magic vanishing bird cage, so here they are side by side:
The dimensions are exactly the same. There are a couple of small differences. The cage I just got isn’t stamped “OWEN” where the cage on the left that’s 100% and Owen is stamped. The lack of a stamp doesn’t mean that it’s not an Owen, as there was a period decades ago were many weren’t stamped. The Owen cage that I already has was much more modern.
Another difference between the two cages are the corner pieces.
The modern Owen cage on the right appears to have the ends peened, where the mystery cage looks like they’re peened and a blob of solder is added. I was chatting with a friend of mine and he found an old Owen Magic Supreme catalog and the ends of the corner bars also have the solder blobs!
This catalog is from the 80’s and back then the Challenge Cage Mystery was $97.50!!!
After asking around a bit, I got this little bit of information:
The size of the rails match those dimensions.
Based on all of this, I’m now 99% confident to call this birdcage and Owen Challenge Cage Mystery!
One problem is that one of the corners needs a repair, it’s missing the solder blob.
I’m sending this out to my birdcage guy and he’s going to repair it and polish up the cage!
-Louie
PS: if you come across a vanishing bird cage, feel free to reach to me to see if I’m interested in buying it!
I love that there are people who know what I’m into and when they run into thing that they think I’d like, they text me! For example, I collect vanishing bird cages and last month at magic live my buddy Clive Hayward sent me some pictures of a vanishing bird cage that was for sale there.
This cage is unusual, you’ll notice the side bars are attached by string!
I have a vanishing bird cage in my collection that’s similar, however it has metal parts that connect the sidebars to the cage. I’m curious if maybe this vanishing birdcage was a “budget” model of one with metal connectors, or if this was a home repair.
I’m a huge fan of antique magic, and I think when the current young generation of magicians gets old the antique magic trade will have greatly diminish. The kids coming up in magic over the last decade or so are growing up with downloads, so they aren’t connected as emotionally connected physical props.
I recently found a Merv Taylor Glass Penetration at an auction in Indiana and was the winning bidder!
Looking for auction houses that have some magic stuff is one of my hobbies when I’ve got time between shows. The auction house was only a couple of hours away from where I was performing in Ohio! This was a great find to add to my collection!
I’m a huge fan of Richard Himber and his magic. One of the things that magicians say is that he had a huge ego and they support that by mentioning that he named his tricks the “himber wallet“, “himber ring” etc. That’s not quite true, those tricks were marketed under different names that didn’t have himber in the titles. Magicians started calling them himber ____.
At a magic auction a while ago ago I picked up a Silver Rocket Box that Richard Himber put out. It’s a super clever trick for producing silks.
I added the cup production. One thing that most silk productions lack is an ending. Usually they end with one big silk, which I think isn’t a good ending. You need to bunch up the silks and produce a bowling ball or whatever.
The Chinese Flame Clock is an interesting magic trick. This was invented by Ed Massey and mine appears to have been made by Milson Worth. This style of illusion isn’t really a modern style, however I’m sure there’s someone out there killing with it!
The trick is really solid, I think it’s pretty deceptive. It’s nothing that I would do, but it’s a great example of creating a method to make an effect happen!
Recently when I was travelling, I came across this magic set in a junk shop
And here’s the picture of the lower tray
They really don’t make magic sets like this anymore. Everything has it’s own neat package, there’s some glass props, if I had the space to properly display it, it’d probably be more interested in it. However I think a bit overpriced at $795! I’m not a magic kit collector, but based on the people I talked to it priced about double what it’s worth.
