This beautiful effect was invented by Carlton Bradford and built and marketed by Frank Klein c. 1978. When I first saw this in 1980 at the IBM convention in Brighton, England I fell in love with the amazing little Plexi-Glass box. But I didn’t get to own one until almost twenty years later in 1998 🙂
There were actually four different versions of this effect released by Frank Klein:
- Miniature Zig-Zag in wood c. 1978
- Miniature Zig-Zag in stunning Plexi-Glass c. 1988
- Enhanced Miniature Zig-Zag c. 1992 (this had the extra feature of the lifting the flap in the center section)
- Ultimate Miniature Zig-Zag c. 1994 (a choice of three cans could be chosen)
To my mind the difference between the Enhanced and the Ultimate was almost a backward step since an extra couple of moves were required that bought you very little, and even when I performed the ultimate (which had no structural changes to the cabinet) I still stuck with the original single Coke can effect and ignored the option to have a can chosen.
It is easy enough to change the beverage should you want something different. When I last performed this in c. 1998 I only drank Coke Classic, but a few years later I switched to Diet and haven’t drank Classic since so the first thing I did when I pulled this out was change.
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