Welcome to Trashy Magic

Trashy Magic was created to help inspire young people beginning their adventure into magic. How well I remember the days of my youth when I could look at all of the gleaming magic props; but afford none. Trashy Magic is here to help the financially impaired get started in learning the ways of effectively performing magic without the need for expensive apparatus. The items shown on this web page will all be made from discarded materials or more simply put - TRASH. It will be up to the performer to research the effects mentioned and to seek out or develop their own routines utilizing the trash that can be found almost any where. BTW - the usual "cheap magician" is welcome here too (financially impaired or not).

Contributions to this web page are welcome. I will add to this web page as time permits and if there seems to any sort of interest. If not, I'll drop it.

The first item will be in response to the youth who have written me inquiring about salt gimmicks. Yes, I make high end salt gimmicks for the pros. These are designed to work flawlessly and give many years of service. Such relatively expensive gimmicks are not absolutely necessary for the performance of the effect.

The suggestion offered here is an item which fits into the hand perfectly and even has a sliding valve for ease of filling and flow control. The item for your consideration is a Jelly Belly brand jelly bean dispenser as seen here:

Notice the sliding valve.

The sliding valve could easily be better sealed with a small piece of craft foam glued into place to serve as a gasket type of material.

This container fits into the hand perfectly with the valve controlled by the little finger.

Tip: A small hole could be drilled into the valve to control flow and the valve only used for filling.

If you can use this idea, feel free to do so. The routines are available in a couple books. Do your research.

This first item is a test to determine if there is enough interest in such a web page to continue it.

Well, there seems to be some interest...

The second item is extremely useful and found virtually everywhere - a sensor strip to prevent theft from stores.

The top of the sensor strip looks like this.

The bottom looks like this.

If you open up the sensor strip, you will find a few very thin strips for encoding and a thicker shim steel strip. This steel strip is what you want.

The shim steel strip looks like this and can have rubber cement on it.

The strip could be cut into tiny pieces and placed between card paper layers to make a gimmicked card in a deck of playing cards.

Shown here is the steel piece stuck on the back of a card to indicate placements.

The card is being held up by a small neo magnet. This magnet could be placed in the end of a wand, pen, etc. or a PK type of ring could be used.

A duplicate of the gimmicked card could be forced, returned to the deck, deck shuffled, and the "selected card" could be found with the wand as shown here:

For other effects the whole strip could be sandwiched between layers in the center of the card.

So much for the card workers - now on to something NEW and POWERFUL for the coin guys...

The steel shim strip could be placed and glued inside of a coin shell going perpendicular to the axis of the face of the coin. The solid coin would have two tiny neo magnets embedded near the rim of the coin. When the shell is placed onto the coin in one direction, there would be no attraction. When the shell is turned so that the steel shim strip lines up with the two magnets (coin axes match), the coin and shell attract and can be freely thrown from hand to hand.

Commercial rights for such a magnetic locking coin set are reserved.

More to come as time permits...