Why don't you just post a link to Penguin. There are photos of the cups on their web site?

Or go to the cups and balls museum. You can see all of these cups, including the rare ones you can't get any more.

Penguins cups are very good for the price, but if you don't want to expend 100 bucks look on ebay or magic shops on line for Magic Makers cups they are 50 bucks or less. So if you get a little defective set, what the %#"$! ??.
you will get what you paid for. if you are lucky you will get a perfect Paul Fox copy.

Perfect Paul Fox Copy? LOL It's been tried, Busby, us at RNT II. There is no such thing as a PERFECT Paul Fox copy.

I meant a non defective set. Even those Porper cups that you love are not perfect.

Ok, whats not perfect about the Porper cups? What are the flaws? Saying the Porper cups are not Perfect has nothing to do with the fact that several of us have tried to reproduce the Paul Fox cup Spec for Spec and have been unsuccessful. That's nothing to do with perfection, but ultimate failure.

If you received a set of Porper cups with no box and no wand, they must be used, I've never known Joe to cut loose an order without the box and wand. So if they're used cups, well of course they wouldn't be mint if actually used for performance.

Jake

I also am curious as to what you mean by this. Although I have only one set of his metal cups, they are uniform, well-balanced and carefully engineered. When you make CNC cups, they come very close to being perfectly identical. Any deviation will occur if there is a polishing problem. I've never seen this on a set of Porper cups.

Granted, Joe can stick up for himself, so I really don't need to say this.

That is fascinating. Is there a particular feature that is causing problems? Or is it a matter of getting one part right, then having something unexpected happen to another?

Cool.

John

If they weight almost the same, are they perfect ??
All I said was that not all penguins sets are defective. I know Jake can make them much better, but over $200.

You are playing with words. Let's turn your question around. If they have different weights, say ± .1 ounce, are they imperfect? Does "perfection" mean that each one is absolutely identical? If so, then we get back to the old "well, each item has one tiny defect, because only the Almighty is perfect."

The reason the Penguin cups are cheaper is because of cheap Chinese labor and cheap materials. A bad copper alloy (few people use pure copper, for various reasons) can produce really strange results.

Even doing it himself, it costs Jake more to make a set of cups than it does to get them from China.

BILL,
I agree.

John,
yes, it's the blend from the saddle ridge to the shoulder bead. I've tried laser scanning the originals, but as most know there was multiple toolings used and I think they ran these in batches using different toolings, I have about 15 sets of PF/DD in copper that I spent years collecting just to make a match. So even back then tooling wasn't duplicated quite the same. Even some of the saddle ridges were different from set to set over the years, one had the sharp edge some had a rounded edge.

We're retiring the whole PF line at RNT II. They have run their course, I have several stainless sets left and that's that. Time to move on. Maybe in the year 3000 someone will be able to duplicate a PF spec for spec with that bloody blending

Jake

I did a cross cut of my first set of Penguins, people have no idea of the copper crap they are using in China, there is more alloy than copper. And pitting, holy crike! The pits under the polish are horrible, which eventually show up after maintenance polishing. This is caused by the alloy and the lack of correct annealing.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, CNC is NOT an EXACT science, what looks identical may vary in weight depending on the density of the block or bar stock used. I paid close to 1K for my stainless cups I think, would I do it again? *** straight, Porper cups are the pinnacle of cnc perfection, along with Johnson cups. CNC is also very expensive, I bet Joe had to change out milling bits ever few sets of cups if not sooner. Diamond carbide bits, you need a small loan to buy a set.

Johnson released the copper version of their famed brass cup. I bet more were scrapped than actually produced. Even machine grade copper is a bugger to CNC due to being so soft.

The small crafters, Jim Riser, Joe Porper, Todd Lassen, Jamie Schoolcraft and RNT II, we have a reputation to uphold. One we hold dear to us, I'm sure none of us know what an 8 hour work day is, the next time you look at a product from anyone of us and see a price tag on it that you feel is too high, please take into consideration something that none of us factor into the cost of our production. We don't factor in those nights when there's an empty seat at the dinner table, or our wives roll over at night and we're not in bed and the shop light is still on, or our children sad because we were involved in a custom order and we couldn't make it to a ball game. Some of us suffered heart attacks and watched our families fall apart because we love our craft so much, we will make sure we give everyone their moneys worth for top notch products.

If anyone of us ever used these factors, time we will never get back, no one could afford us, time with our loved ones is PRICELESS. So the next time you look at a set of Penguin or Tragic Maker cups, think about the little guy over in China making 85 cents an hour and using crap material. Then look at ours and think about what we actually sacrifice to bring the BEST tools to the market.

Jake

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I should add that the van Dokkum cups are also extremely well crafted. When you look at the nesting cups he did for Mark Mason, you see some really fine work. I've been in Auke's machine shop, and I've seen him do his thing. Some people think CNC is a short cut. While it does some things very well and very quickly, there is a LOT of waste. My monster cups are a perfect example. These cups weigh almost 2 Kg. each. They are cut from a chunk of stainless that weighs about 24 Kg. That's more than 90% waste. None of that is recoverable. And the cups don't come from the CNC machine finished. After they are cut, then they are hand polished. This polishing is not a cheap process as Jake, Jim Riser and Auke can tell you.


I wish I could talk about some of the things Auke has coming out, but I have to keep MUM. I usually keep it on the shelf next to TLR.

Bill,
I feel horrible, I left Auke out. There is a man who can work MAGIC with a CNC machine. We have several small CNC milling machines here we use for signs, anything done with solid stock raw materials has a huge waste factor.

Hats off to Auke, and again my apologies for leaving him out of the list.

Jake

$458 bucks for a standard size cups, is quite fair since they are CNC and Auke's work is consider TOP OF THE LINE. I don't have a set yet, but I have handled them.

Don't feel bad. It's hard to remember everyone. If you drop one of those Monster cups on your foot, you will never forget him!

Are those monster cups workable? Or they are just like a toy or what? I have never seen a magician using one of those monster cups, may need 2 magicians to handle them, but very unpractical.
I wonder if Penn & Teller would like to give it a try.

So far there are only two sets in existence. I have one set and Piet Forton has the other. They are workable, but it requires some odd techniques to get the most out of them. Benson Bowl moves work well with them.