Please excuse me, if may be a bother on this.i've posted it elsewere and perhaps I got the right place. Making my own rubber eggs as I recall they were called the Weller egg. These sre from duck eggs empty the content and placed in white vinegar, problem in trying to solve: egg wont open and or open well, and it dries up faster than I figured. Please advise me.

Aren't you supposed to store the egg in a container filled with glycerin? I may be wrong.

Cheers!

Hi Donrodrigo,
You are not trying to make rubber eggs - for that you would need a mold and latex rubber. Weller was the company years ago that produced those type of "simulated" eggs that were used for the production of many eggs and the egg on fan trick.
What you are making, or want to make is called an egg skin. You are actually preserving the embryonic sac that is attached to the inside wall of an egg. I used to make these all the time using chicken eggs, but I guess a duck egg would be a little larger and more visible if you are doing the egg on fan.
What you must do is take a needle or turkey skewer and very carefully make a small hole in either end of the raw egg. Now insert the turkey skewer into the middle of the egg (without making the hole any bigger) and move the skewer around inside the egg in order to break the yolk and make the egg a little more liquid. Once this is done, the contents can be blown out of the egg by simply making a tight seal with your lips over one of the two holes and blowing out the contents through the other. If the liquid is not coming out, you may have to enlarge that hole a little. Now, immerse the hollow egg in a glass of water and again poke the skewer into the egg in order for water to fill it up and work the air bubbles out. As an option you can suck water into the egg the same way you would with a drinking straw, but you run the risk of getting a little egg yolk in your mouth. When the egg is full of water, blow out the water, then repeat a couple of times to wash out the excess egg white and yolk. Make sure all of the water and gunk is out before proceeding to the next step.
Now, immerse the egg in vinegar (in a glass) and make sure it fills up the inside (like you did with the water). The vinegar, being an acid, will react with the calcium egg shell and virtually melt it away. It will take several hours before you see a white scum around the egg - this means the vinegar is eating it away. At this point the shell should be thin enough and the sac tough enough that you can carefully peel the shell away in small pieces without damage to the sac. If you don't want to chance ruining the sac, wait a lot longer until the shell is almost disolved. Regardless, you will be left with a tough sac that when inflated, looks like the egg it came from. I usually drain the vinegar out of the sac and very carefully wash it inside and out with cold water. To prevent the holes at either end of the sac from tearing or ripping, you may want to take a pair of fine cutical scissors and round them off a little. The sac can now be completely collapsed, and will resemble a crumpled piece of tissue paper. When the sac is bounced up and down on a fan - or anything else for that matter - and air will work it's way into the sac and inflate it to the full size of the egg, but you must keep bouncing it to retain the full shape. The color will always be a bit translucent and not look exactly like a real egg shell, but the trick is to reach out and grab the sac (deflating it) while switching it with a real egg already in that hand. From a distance it will look like the egg magically grew.
You must always keep the sac moist or it will dry up and turn hard. A real egg sac will last for a few shows before getting dirty (wash it off after every show) or ripping. I kept my egg skins in a pill bottle that had a little bit of wet cotton in the bottom. The only other thing I can think of is that the odd time the egg sac, when deflated too long, will devlop creases in the skin and when it is inflated takes on a bit of a funny shape - although when kept moving is only obvious to the performer.
Hope this helped! Have fun with it.

Bruce Hunt

Great explaination Bruce! In John Carney's Secrets book he suggests duck eggs because of the size, but I've had no problems from common chicken eggs. It does help a bit to rub the skin with some glycerin and you do need to store it wet. When I am making blown eggs (I wish there was a nicer way to say that ), I use a dremmel tool to drill an 1/8" hole in each end of the egg. This keeps the holes from tearing and makes the egg last much longer.

Thanks,
Richard

Hi Richard,
Good idea! I'll have to try that with my dremmel.I have also heard of a little needle pointed suction machine that hobbyists use to make hollow eggs for the Ukrainian decorated Easter eggs. I had thought about getting one at one time, but how many of these things do I need? I'll also try a little bit of glycerin.

Bruce

I have the formula from Dr. Spensor Thorton (handwritten) and it calls for a hot needle to pierce the egg initially. Hope that helps.

Mr. Hunt I appreciate you writing all this for me thank you so much SIR. And thak you friends for your contribution. Respectfully Don.