Barry's Guide to Gimmicked Coins (Copper, Silver and Lies)

Ten bits of machined metal that look exactly like pocket change, cost considerably more than pocket change, and do things pocket change has no business doing.

Coin magic has a reputation for being the hard stuff. The pure art. Men with enormous hands doing retention vanishes in hotel bars and looking faintly disappointed in the rest of us. And it is hard, if you do it with ordinary coins. The dirty secret is that a very large number of those men also have a shell in their pocket, and the good ones have been using it for decades while telling students to practise their classic palm.

A gimmicked coin is a real coin (or a very good copy of one) that has been cut, hollowed, split, glued or magnetised so that it can do one specific impossible thing. The skill is not in the coin. The skill is in making it look as though there is nothing special about the coin, which mostly means not handling it like it is made of glass and not staring at it like it owes you money.

One thing to know before you start. Nearly every gimmicked coin worth buying is made from American coins, half dollars and dollars mostly, because they are big, they look good and the Americans invented most of this. Do not worry about it. Nobody in a British pub has ever asked why you are carrying American money. They assume you have been on holiday, and they are usually right. Our UK coin gimmicks (the 10p shells and 50p folding coins) are all sold out as I write this, which tells you something about how many other people have had the same thought.

Shells: the one everything else is built on

Expanded Shell Half Dollar (Heads) by Tango

A shell is the face of a coin, hollowed out, and an expanded shell is one that has been stretched very slightly so a real coin fits snugly inside it. Put the two together and it looks like one coin. Separate them and it looks like two. That is the whole idea, and from that one idea you get coins across, coins appearing, coins vanishing, coins changing and roughly half the coin routines ever published.

Tango make the best gimmicked coins in the business, which is not me being polite, it is simply what everyone in coin magic will tell you. You also get a link to Tangopedia, which is four hours of instruction covering more than fifty gimmicked coin effects, so you are not buying a coin, you are buying a coin and a syllabus. If you only ever buy one gimmicked coin, buy this. John Kennedy's Translocation is the routine to learn with it.

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Perfect Shell Coin Set (Half Dollar) by Tango Magic

The problem with a standard expanded shell is that it covers most of the coin inside it, not all of it, and a sharp eyed spectator at the wrong angle can occasionally see a thin line where there should not be one. The Perfect Shell set solves this by giving you a shell and four special coins made to fit it completely, so the coin is hidden one hundred per cent and every coin in the routine matches.

Ninety nine ninety nine is a lot of money for five coins, and I know that, and you know that, and your partner will certainly know that when the statement arrives. But as the description points out, you are going to use your own coins anyway, because nobody has half dollars in their pocket. You may as well use your own coins that are built to lie properly.

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Two coin gimmicks: silver, copper and chaos

Artisan HD Hopping Half Set by TCC

A silver coin and a copper coin in your hand. You put one in your pocket. Both are still in your hand. You do it again. Still two. And again. Then you put the copper one away and open your hand, and now both have gone. It was invented by a Scotsman called Jim Boyd in 1967 as Confusing Coins, and it is still confusing people nearly sixty years later, which is a better track record than anything else I owned in 1967, including my hairline.

The makers say you will be performing it within three minutes of opening the box, and for once the claim is roughly honest. The routine is almost entirely in the gimmick, which is why it is the best coin trick to give a beginner who wants to fool someone the same evening. Our best coin tricks to learn guide covers where to go afterwards.

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Artisan HD Sun & Moon Set by TCC

A silver coin changes to copper, and back, in ways that look like editing. The Sun and Moon has been a coin worker's secret for years, used by people like Geoff Latta and Roger Klause, and the problem with the original was that the penny shell was never quite big enough to cover the half dollar, so you needed real sleight of hand to hide the difference.

TCC fixed it by making a half dollar that is trimmed and re-milled to fit inside the shell while still looking exactly like a normal one. That takes it from a coin expert's prop to something a keen beginner can do. Thirty ninety nine, which is cheaper than most of the books that would have taught you the hard way.

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RBG 2.0 by N2G

The copper silver brass (or CSB) is one of the classic coin gimmicks: three coins of different metals that can swap hands, vanish and reappear in ways that should not be possible with three coins. RBG 2.0 is N2G's tribute to it, using a Morgan dollar, a copper coin and an ancient Chinese coin, and the big selling point is how quickly one coin can become all three.

It needs a bit more handling than the hopping half, and you will want to go through the instructions twice before you take it out in public. If you have done the hopping half to death and want something that makes a table go quiet, this is the next step. It is sixty eight ninety nine, which is about what I would expect to pay for three coins that are secretly one coin.

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David Regal's Locking Dollar-Sized Copper/Silver would sit alongside these, and it is very good, but it has sold out at the time of writing. The locking bit matters, because an unlocked copper silver coin can separate at the worst possible moment, which is always the moment someone has asked to have a closer look.

The rest of the toolkit

Vanishing Nickel by John Cornelius

A coin sits on your open palm. You close your fingers, open them, and it has gone. You turn the hand over, fingers spread, and there is nothing on the back either. Close, open, and the coin is back. Doug Henning did it on television and it looked like a camera trick then, and it still looks like one now, in your hand, in front of someone's face.

No black art, no tape, no lighting restrictions, repeatable immediately, and it takes up the space of one nickel in your pocket. It is the cheapest thing on this list at nineteen ninety nine and possibly the most visual. It is a nickel, which nobody in Britain has ever seen, so call it a lucky coin from Florida and move on.

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Power Coin (Half Dollar) by Himitsu Magic

A real half dollar with a very strong magnet built into it, strong enough to work through your hand. A magnetic coin is not a trick on its own. It is a utility gimmick, and it is used in loads of routines for sticking coins to things, making them move, finding them under a table and generally doing jobs that would otherwise need a thread, some wax or a very good nerve.

It does one thing, it does it very well, and it will also pick up your keys, your spare change and, eventually, everything metal in your coat pocket. Keep it away from your bank cards. I will not be taking questions on how I know.

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PUP (Set) by David Regal

Particularly Useful Purses, to give them their full name. Regal's point is simple: coins should be examined before the magic happens, so let them be. These leather purses let you hand out coins for inspection and then switch all or some of them for gimmicks as they go back in, with your hands seen empty and the purse held by a corner.

They also keep your gimmicks in the right order and the right way up, rather than rattling loose in your pocket like a man who has just come back from a car boot sale. Forty two ninety nine. If you already own a couple of the coins above, this is how you make them look ordinary. For a purse that doubles as a wallet, see the Flip Flap in Barry's guide to magic wallets.

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ProKito by Brian Watson

An Okito box is a small round coin box with a lid, and the classic effects are a coin passing through the bottom of the box, vanishing from inside it, and generally refusing to stay where it was put. Brian Watson is the man who makes some of the best cups and balls in the world, and his problem with every Okito box he had ever seen was that it looked like a magic prop.

So he made one from pewter with an ornate pattern that looks like something you might keep pills or a spare cufflink in, and weighted it properly so the classic Okito moves feel right in the hand. Sixty four fifty. It is a lovely object and I resent how much I want one.

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If you want it in one breath: buy the expanded shell first, because it is the foundation of half of coin magic and it comes with four hours of teaching. Buy the Hopping Half if you want something you can do tonight. Buy the Sun and Moon if you want to look like you know what you are doing. And please, put the coins in a purse, not loose in your pocket, because the sound of a shell clinking against its partner is the sound of a secret leaving the building.