8 Vane Cat's-eyes

[Al Oregon]

I'm seeing more of the 8 vane cat's-eyes showing up on eBay and bringing good money. I'm not talking about the Vitro 8 finger transparents and opaques but cage style cat's-eyes. In my opinion, these are almost all newer marbles so be aware. They are part of the many out of the Imperial packaging from Far East, India, etc. Here's pics from one package I have.

[PatryD]

That package is great Al.

You are right about the confusion in 8 vein marbles. Especially for the new collectors.

[Brian5635]

Al,

My understanding and belief is that there are two kinds of 8-vane catseyes. The one you speak about is newer and has an oily surface glass and usually thinner vanes. The other has thicker vanes and does not have the oily surface glass. I believe that the latter is from the same time period as the 9-vanes & cross-throughs.

Where is Pinx when you need her?

B

[Sword44]

I agree, those really thin 8-vane cats are new. I have seen an 8-vane Vitro Hybrid cat - but only one - and a 7-vane Vitro caged cat - again, only one. Both manufacturing anomalies, I'm sure.

Sword44

[Pinx]

Here are the older Japanese 8 vanes in an original cellophane Camel bag. I'm guessing these are from the 1960s or earlier.

Some of the colors on the newer ones that Al shows come really close to the vintage cats. Howerver, as Brian mentioned, the surface of the newer ones are oily or sometimes slightly iridescent. Could be very hard for a newbie to distinguish, especially from a picture.

Elizabeth

[marblemover]

i think these are all older ones

[wvrons]

Vitro did make a eight vane cage cat,not many, but i have a few. The Vitro seven vane cage cats are not to difficult to come up with,the five and six are more common. I got about a couple dozen Vitro cage cats in the mail today from Jim King,and i am sure there was one maybe two that were seven vane.

Yes,there is some other companies that also has 7-8 vane cats that are similiar to Vitro.

Yes,don't get confused with Vitro eight fingers. These are a whole different marble.

[sissydear]

Our sister-in-law who is Japanese, brought Weldon some cat eyes from Japan in the late 1990's while on a visit to her family there. I know they have been around a while. She brought 5/8 and also some nearly an inch. They do look a lot like our cateyes. Sissy

[Taunya]

Hi Al!

How about the Japanese 8-vane multicolors that Castle and Peterson describe in their book. Eight vane three color cages, with white at 12, 3, 6, and 9 o’clock. Also eight vane three color cages, with white at 9 and 3 o’clock. I do not have examples of either, unless my memory is bad. Do you have them? Are they also newer?

Taunya

[Brian5635]

Here is a collection of different vane counts & colors...

[Al Oregon]

Foreign cat's-eyes were of notorious poor quality at times. This leads to a lot of 'other than normal' marbles. For example, the third pic down - the red/orange, blue & white - is a 9 vane cat's-eye with one of the blue vanes either gone or too faint to readily see. Therefore, it looks like an 8 vane. That's an example of what I personally call an error, not really an 8 vane cat's-eye. Nonetheless, I collect 'error' marbles, too, so I have some like that in my collection. Similarly, in the 5th pic down, it looks like there might be 4 yellow vanes so someone could call that a 10 vane cat's-eye but it's jsut another 'error'. Great pictures by the way - the rest are not 'error' marbles but specific types (in case anyone was thinking I was saying all of those were errors).