MAKING YOUR OWN EXTRACTOR Making your own extractor isn’t nearly as hard as you might think. Its just rather t ime consuming and takes some patience. If you like the effect I highly recommend you to do the right thing and buy it. However they are hand made and due to that, hard t o get without waiting long time in lines, and rather expensive. In case you happen to broke yours, you would have to buy new one for 100euros and that’s a lot of money. So to make your own Extractor, you will need. - 1 NEW DECK OF CARDS WITH CARDCASE - SOME SUPER STICKY TAPE (Duct tape, Air condition tape or similar) - SOME FLEXIBLE GLUE (Not necessary needed but I found it helped) helped) - PIECE OF WOOD AND AND TOOLS TO HANDLE HANDLE IT (Can be be also avoided but best best quality is achieved with this) - SCISSORS - EXACTO KNIFE
PART 1 – MAKING THE TEMPLATE AND CUTTING THE CARDS First thing you must do is to cut your cards for the front end “Inserting gimmick”. It says on the DVD that the front end is actually wider than normal cards so just cutting em normally up isn’t enough, UNLESS you have access to wider cards that bicycles or tally hos. It doesn’t matter what cards you use to make the front end cos the backs are not seen. I assume, that like me, you don’t have access to wider cards but you will have to get yours made from normal bicycle deck. The following pictures are all made fast with paint. I didn’t have energy to start to use photoshop to make higher quality pictures or start to take my gimmicks apart and scan em. So first measure up the inside of your card box. IF YOU WANT, you can first open up your card box and clue it back together making it little wider that it originally is. Even the few millimetres will help, but this will work without as well. Enlargement the card box however makes the gimmick little smoother to operate. However I only enlarged my 2nd gimmick, so it might work better just because I was more experienced when making it. When you have measured the card box you have to make a template. Take a playing card and measure the width of the card box, from the end of the playing card and make a line there.
Cut the card along the line and round the corner. You can now use this card as a template to draw where to cut all the rest of the cards. However, if you have access to paper cutter, you can just take the measurement and use that to cut the whole deck. This would make making the gimmick like 80% faster, but I didn’t have access to one so I made mine completely by hand. I just drew the lines to all cards and cut em all with scissors. It took maybe around hour or so. I just watched television while I was doing this.
You will end up with pretty much whole deck cut into 2/3rds or so and have an extra rounded corner on the cards now. We will now do some work with the card case before continuing with the front end.
PART 2 – GAFFING OF THE BOX Its easier to gaff the box now. First you will have to make a slit thru the box. I made mine above the rider back mark. It doesn’t really have to be invisible cos this side of the box will never be seen. So just by using exacto knife make the slit.
Next part is to make the wooden end to the box. There really isn’t any specific instructions on how to do this. Just make sure that the upper end is right under the slit and then cut it around 35-45 degree angle. The wood doesn’t really have to be even the width of the box
and it will still work fine. Once the wood is cut, you can use superglue to glue it in its place by just dropping it inside of the box. Its important to glue the slit to the wood so the card will end up popping outside of the box and not just inside, but above the wood.
Now I promised there is optional way how to avoid the use of the wood all together. However I will go thru it later because it would affect the way how you make the front end gimmick.
PART 3 – MAKING UP THE FRONT END GIMMICK There is now 2 ways to make the front end gimmick, depending if you had access to the wood or not. First the way with the wood.
First I recommend you put the pieces you have in numerical order. This is so that if you drop em you can get em back into same order. I learned this the hard way. Once you done that you must cut em again, one by one so that each card is little shorter than the card above it. The measurements for these cuts depend how you cut your wood and in what angle. In a way you construct a very similar gimmick to Daryls Ultimate
ambition, but the other part is being wood, and the cards aren’t stuck together with needle and thread or glue but they are all free. Once you have cut the cards, and have em in order, take about 48 of em, square the end that is going to be visible against hard surface, and tape em together, by running some vary sticky tape around em. Don’t tape em too hard, but try to get the edges of the cards firmly into the tape. Here is the option of using some flexible clue on the edges of the cards. I used basic rubber cement and it seems to work just fine. On my later model I was little bored of waiting the clue to dry, and cos it had wider box, I just used superglue on the edges. Now the stepping of the front end packet isn’t done in the orginal. However I found out that this will greatly enchant the working of the gimmick, along with tape and clue, cos it will prevent any other card from sliding inside of the case along with marked card. Once the gimmick is made, just slide it inside the box, and possibly you can even clue it in place on sides, or top or bottom if you want. I didn’t, in case mine ever brokes and more than one card ends up inside of the box along with marked card. This way its easy to get it out again. The final box should look something like this.
OPTIONAL WAY WITHOUT THE WOOD Now it is possible to make the Extractor gimmick completely without the wood. This is how I made my first one. Instead of wood, I just glued normal playing card to my front end stack. Then once I put it inside the case I took the card outside of the slit and glued it in place outside of the case. This way it worked out as a slide, like the wood would. However the back end of the box is hollow this way so it might be a good idea to glue something in there, to make it keep its shape better. It can be anything really, a dice, piece of cardboard and so on I marked the place with green in next set of illustrations.
ONE MORE OPTIONAL WAY OF MAKING THE EXTRACTOR There is yet one faster way of making the extractor, but it might make it break prematurely. However I will explain it shortly anyway. Instead of making the front end gimmick stepped, you could make it, like in the orginal, the front end is only about inch long. The advantage of this is as well that you must only cut 24-25 cards, then cut em from around the center giving you a total of around 50 cards with less work. You will also skip the edging part.
This will certainly work, I have tried it, but the lasting of the gimmick is dependable totally on how the tape and/or glue holds the front end gimmick together once the cards are pushed thru it. There might be a solution to keep the front end together, t hat I haven’t thought off. If that is the case, then this would be the far most simplest and fastest way to make the gimmick and it does work. I made one.
