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!