5 Stars

The Linking Rings were the product that gave Mike Brazill’s company it’s name. In 1969 Mike Brazill started making some beautiful Chinese Linking Ring sets in his basement in Jennings, Missouri – in his first year alone Mike and a helper turned out over a thousand sets of his “new design” Linking Rings.  The following year Mike teamed up with Harry Montieth and they designed a new set of metal Cups and Balls. Miss Sandy Byrne was also hired to take care of the Office while Mike ran the Plant, Sandy’s passion for keeping the orders flowing and the customers happy was only matched by Mike’s talent for metal craft. That year the organization produced nearly three thousand sets of rings, six hundred sets of cups and over a thousand dove pans. They were now making “Rings … and things.” By 1972 Mike Brazill incorporated the fledgling company and officially named it: Rings ‘N Things Magic Co.  (Jay Malbrough – Genii Magazine, November 1977)

This is an amazing set of Liquor Multiplying Bottles from the Original Rings ‘N’ Things and 47 years later they still look amazing after all these years.

The tubes are typical Rings ‘N Things quality with no seams to be found, rolled rims and accents, Mike Brazill’s exclusive epoxy-baked miracle finish, realistic labels, basically they’re perfectly made. You won’t find any passe passe bottles better than these.

The Liquor Bottles were more plentiful than the Bubble-Up (7-Up copies) but both sets are rare, meticulously made and are minor miracles. These bottles are pure perfection.

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The electronics work of Marcelo and Victor Contento is second to none. If you are looking for 100% reliability then their brand will never fail you. Their version of the Jumbo Rising Cards is regarded by many, including myself, as the best version ever created. It is very reliable, with advanced features and incredibly easy to use.

You press a single button once to go up and a single button once to go down from almost anywhere in the room. The cards will then rise or fall to the right height and automatically stop. This was the model that Billy McComb used for years and two of his routines are featured with the instructions.

What I really like about this model is how reliable it is.  That being said over time the cards themselves can get worn out. When this unit arrived the cards that rose were in a pretty bad way and would stick sometimes.  As long as you replace them with the old style, thick bicycle Jumbo cards you should be fine.  The other thing to keep an eye on is how many cards you need to place in the houlette. It has a clever spring in front to maintain the correct tension, but you still must make sure you don’t over fill it with cards, otherwise they can stick.  If you read the instructions, which I know is tricky sometimes, it tells you precisely the right amount of cards to use so this is not hard to achieve.  But if you are having issues it could be because your cards are dirty or you have too many cards jammed in front.

The routines that Billy supplies come with a decent deck switch, which is easy to do and works well, but even Billy himself stopped using the switch over time and just used a small deck for the selection.  This streamlines the operation even more.

The routine I am using is a combination of Billy’s and Marcello’s and I’m very happy with it. So much so that I might even feature this routine for my Holiday shows this Christmas 🙂

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I love this little plastic top 🙂

This was released by Sam c. 2008 and it was based on an earlier device (quite possibly this one) but Sam did not invent it.  He modified his version slightly and thought it would be more useful with colors rather than numbers.  I agree 100% with him, there are plenty of dice you can use to force a number from 1 to 6, but when it comes to colors your options are limited.

When you need to force a color this could not be a simpler approach – just have the spectator spin the top and it will end up on the color you want every time.  It is instant to set and can be handed to the spectator to spin without worrying that they will figure anything out.

When I need to force a color this is the perfect little device I know you will love, thank-you Sam Dalal!

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The Chinese Coin Trick is an old effect (well over one hundred years – the first ad I found for it was from Martinka’s in 1914) and has been known also as The Miracle of Confucius (in Illustrated Magic by Ottokar Fischer).

Francois Danis has created a very pretty version.  The coins and cord fit perfectly in a beautifully crafted and decorated box. The routine requires two simple moves but everything is covered well by the props and routine. And as a result everything can be examined at the end.

This is a real fooler and once you try it a few times you will quickly fall in love with it too.

Great job Francois 🙂

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Johnson Precision Magic or Johnson Products are well known for their fake coins and brass coin gimmicks. But this was one of their early non-coin effects, that was made as equally well as any of their coin work.

This has been long unavailable which is a shame because it really is a wonderful effect. The props are well made and it has a clean simple method that will impress you.

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This is basically a copy of the the effect created by Tony Lackner and Eckhard Boettcher called Mental Chips and used in Bank Night Gone Wrong.  I have added some envelopes with stickers so you can perform almost the same Bank Night effect as the original.  Of course you can also use it as a basic prediction or even a color force.

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