Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/03/magic-trick-revealed-how-to-e.html
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Timely!
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I fully expected it to be this trick:
And here’s the behind-the-back version:
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Don’t have a pin handy? There’s always hope for the soda can shim (or ‘lockpick’). (“Oh right… and like I’ve got scissors and pliers up me bum!?” …well, pre-made shims stow a bit less prickly than pins and they afford more options, s’all i’m say’n. Fortune favors the prepared …usw)
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“For our next trick: how to escape from a fascist government”
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Great, now show us how to do it if they are actually strapped in tight rather than loose enough that you can slip your hands through.
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So did i but that isn’t going to work on the heavy duty police ties as shown in the original video, you often see them attached to their body armour in the partially closed state and one would probably risk breaking their wrists before those snapped.
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Is there any solvent that would weaken this plastic enough to stretch/tear without also being just horrible for skin and living things?
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See, you see in the movies a prisoner keeping a paperclip or a pin in their mouth and using it to pick regular police handcuffs (which generally, doesn’t work IRL).
This is much more believable.
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Max: “Don’t worry. I swallowed a handcuff key this morning. Once I go to the can, I’ll soon have us freed.”
Agent 99: “Brilliant! But how’d you know you’d need one today?”
Max: "I didn’t.
Agent 99: ?
Max: “I swallow it every morning.”
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Certainly not in the uk, i don’t know about cops in the states but ours tend to carry the rigid type and unless you can dislocate your wrists at will then i don’t think you’re going to be picking them.
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Nope. They’re nylon. Melting or cutting, preferably with heavy duty shears, or a knife with a serrated edge. Even regular zip ties are difficult to cut, I use them regularly at work.
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Yeah, I’ve got some of those big zip ties, and if you can see what you’re doing you could fairly easily shim them open, if you could find a thin piece of stiff metal, like a clip off of a pen lid. (Thanks to William Gibson).
Cutting them takes some doing, a smooth knife blade doesn’t get much traction, a serrated blade like a Spyderco works best, a serrated hawksbill blade even better, you can slip the blade underneath the tie with the smooth spine of the blade against the skin, then cut. Scissors with a slight serration would work as well.
Pulled tight, I can’t see any way to get them off without doing a lot of damage to the wrists.
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Soooo… basically the same thing I do to smaller zipties I can do to larger ones.
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Unfortunately the plastic cuffs shown in the original post are too thick for most people to be able to break.
Incidentally, the pin trick is also useful for reusing ordinary zip-ties.
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Interesting… Are these yellow cuffs the new standard issue? Trickier, but would be easy to have a simple shim like that handy on a keychain.
For the old white zip cuffs, this cheap pocket tool worked well. Same principle, but easier to access the tooth that keeps the tie locked in place on the white ones.
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For me, it’d go like this: “I retrieve the pin from it’s secret hiding place in my cuff, drop the pin on the ground…”. JFC I’ve been getting clumsy lately. Getting old sucks, gabnumbit!
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So the big magic trick reveal is to have a pin or something to shim the lock with?
Wow. Big secret there. I’ll let Penn and Teller know.
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“This is how a magician would escape from a fascist government. Now, remember, no actual citizen should attempt escape from fascists.”
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