BLOG OF AN ESCAMOTEUR

After it took really long to get me hooked on ropes, I know love them and especially my own cut and restored rope routine. In this post I want to share my experiences and ideas on how to prepare / gimmick a rope.

First, what type of rope to use. I recommend a soft cotton rope in pure white with a diameter of about 12mm. They are wonderful visible even on big stages. I would stay away from colored or decorated ropes as you never now how they will look like under certain colored stage lights and you don’t have to worry how they will look together with your clothes if you use white ones.

Taming the ends

Most magician ropes have the nasty habit to fray at there ends, which in my opinion not only looks ugly but also communicates to you audience that you don’t care about your props

A good way to keep the ends from fraying is to fix them with “white glue” the stuff that carpenters use to glue wood. As the ropes are made of cotton it works really well and does not add a shiny surface.

Quite often I see ends tamed like this:

OK, this looks much better than version one, but if you are performing a cut end restored rope routine I feel something feels wrong if you “cut” a rope and the ends look like that.

I prefer another version

It looks like a natural cut rope but does not fray at all. Making them is really easy. Inject the white glue into the hollow center of the end, deep enough so that the glue does not comes out of the end, and massage the end a bit between your fingers

If you ever run into the problem of needing to tame a rope and you have no glue handy, there is a trick that was told me by my teacher Alexander. Extract a strand out of the end of the rope about 10cm / 3″.

and cut/tear it off. Wind it around the end of your rope and make a knot on the ends of the strand:

Rope Magnets

Rope magnets are an extremely powerful tool in the arsenal of a magician. Thanks to the now available super strong Neodym magnets you can use them without the fear that they my split at the wrong moment. I use round magnets with diameter of 5mm and a length of about 8mm and I found that they fit perfectly for ropes about 12mm thick. If you have problems getting this magnets you can order them directly from me.

You can create real wonders with them, but you have to be careful not to leave the audience with the impression that the only solutions must be magnets. I tried several methods how to insert a magnet in a way that looks least suspicious.

The method I tell you now works best if you want to insert the magnet into the middle of  rope, as then the ends will fit perfectly together.

First we have to prevent the strands of the two rope parts to fray. To achieve that cover the the part of the rope were you want to insert the magnet with white glue

and massage it into the rope. Important: Make sure that your fingers are really clean before you start doing this otherwise this part of the rope will keep a brownish color afterwards.

Let it try. you will find the the glued part is hardly to see.  Now cut the rope with a really sharp scissor (knives don’t work well) in the middle of the glued section. The cut ends will keep stiff and won’t fray at all.

Get a real good all-purpose glue and inject it into the ends of the ropes:

And insert the magnets into it:

Hold the magnet already inside the one rope end in place and place the other rope end  over the protruding magnet. This way you will get a very good fit of the two parts in the end. Be careful not to have glue at the edges otherwise you will not be able to split the rope once the glue has dried.

Press the end firmly together taking care the the strands of both ends match as close as possible. Massage the part with you finger to gibe it a good round shape and let it try.

If you did this careful the result should look like this

When the clue has dried you can carefully split the rope again. It happens that one of the magnets goes off again. Don’t worry, add some more glue and pt it back together again.

You will experience that the gimmicked part is almost invisible if you handle the rope casual. Even from close distance your audience will not discover it.

Here is my handling of linking two ropes together. Hold the rope clipped between index and middle finger on one side of the cut, with ring finger and pinky on the other side

and press down with you thump on the cut. The two parts will easily split.

With some practice this can be done extremely fast and nobody will even think that you might have done anything.

What really makes the use of such a gimmick convincing is to have a part of a rope gimmicked all through a longer routine, especially if you really cut peaces off.  The magnets are strong enough that you can handle the rope as if it wasn’t gimmicked.

One last request: If you use a gimmicked rope or any rope set for a longer time. Please make sure to replace them before they start looking unappetizing!

Enjoy!

If you like this article, a small donnation is always welcome and keeps me motivated

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