Project 365 (80/365): Thumbcuffs

.:80/365: Thumbcuffs:.

Handcuffs are cute but overexposed. They’re very useful to show off escapes, but when it comes to portability, it’s hard to beat getting plain old thumbcuffs, which aren’t too difficult to acquire at all in this day and age, and packs very small but plays off perfectly well with a close-up audience.

Thumbcuffs work on the very same principle as their larger counterparts, except for the fact that in locking your thumbs up, it becomes much more difficult to lockpick your way out of them due to the limitations in mobility imposed by the cuffs.

However, any escape artist worth their salt could tell you that there is a nice little feature thumbcuffs naturally possess that handcuffs don’t. And this one little feature makes all the difference and enhances escapes for those who utilize thumbcuffs when it comes to the speed of execution required to pull off a decent escape. It’s funny, it’s amusing, and it certainly has the qualities of a regular in-and-out happy routine.

If a street performer ever felt uncomfortable carrying out full-sized handcuffs, or, heaven forbid, a set of Shanghai shackles at any given time, I do believe that utilizing these very cool thumbcuffs could be a happy medium, as it certainly does the job very well for establishing yourself in less than three minutes as a good escape artist with a dapper sense of humor, to boot. The fact that you can easily subject the average spectator to these cuffs and demonstrate to them how difficult it is to escape from the contraption is just icing on the cake, really.