Simple Box Traps Live Rabbit Box

Description

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

morning folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance outfitters in the pathfinder school what I thought we'd do over the next few days is a set of simple projects for boys having to do with trapping trapping season is in full swing right now and one of the best ways to teach young boys trapping is to teach them how to build simple box style traps and the first trap we're going to build today is a live trap and this trap is very simple to build it's great for rabbits and squirrels and as you can see it's very effective so we're going to build this trap today and then we're going to move on and build a trap that incorporates a 110 Conibear and another trap that will accommodate a large rat trap or a small foothold type trap stay with me and we'll get started all right so what we're doing is starting off with four boards that are two feet long and these are going to form our box and we'll just nail them and glue them together but we're going to need some offset here and then we'll talk about that in just a minute the next thing we want is a door that will slide down what we've done is we have scribed on two of these boards a place to make a dado right here that this door is going to slide up and down and channel inside out because we're going to in the end when this box is together we're going to offset the top of this thing and leave this channel open so that this will slide down inside so we'll cut this down a little bit and width we'll cut these dados out and all of these things can be done with very simple tools very simple hand tools and that's why it's a good project for boys but if you have power tools it's going to make it that much faster you can cut these dados out by using a handsaw and cut to a certain depth and then chisel the dado out or you could take some type of table saw and make those two cuts and make a third cut in there and then chisel it out either way you're going to need to chisel this out when you're done and we're going to make it just a little wider than this piece of board is so that it gives it a good Clear Channel for sliding up and down because this first trap that we're making is going to be a live trap so again it's going to be two-foot overall so we need four pieces of 2 by a 1 by 8 that are 2 foot long then I've cut this one a foot long that's going to be the door in the front so let's get our de tous cut in here and then we'll look at this again okay so we're kind of doing all this without a set of plans just by understanding how the trap supposed to function so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to get this thing put over here figure out how wide my door needs to be so if I've got this setting here and here and there cleaned out properly and one of them's got a little ways to go yet I can kind of piecemeal this together a little bit and look at it and then measure about how wide this door should be now the one thing we're going to do and really we could do after was put together but it's just going to protect the wood if we do it beforehand because we need to drill a hole in this thing for our trigger and I'm just going to measure back here about four inches to give myself a room back here to put bait maybe even five inches actually now we'll go for again we're doing all this on the fly so four inches four inches will scribe a line across here then we'll find our center point and this is seven and a quarter all right so that's three and a half is seven plus and eight is half of a quarter so go three and a half plus an eighth that will give us the center mark and that's where we're going to drill our hole now we're going to use a dowel or just a piece of scrap dowel rod I've got laying here so you've got cobwebs on it for our trigger and it is about three-quarter inch dowel so I'm going to use something quite a bit bigger I'm going to use an inch and a half to put a hole in here because I want plenty of wiggle room here just like we want in our door when it comes down

got box nails and finish nails in this box I might use a combination of both of them here

okay next thing I want to do is we want to make sure that this door that we've made is going to drop in that slot real easy to close our trap then we can take our top and get it cut to size because right now it's a little bit long we've got to give ourselves a little room here so we want to go with this top right to this edge but we want this full 4 inches right here so what we're going to do is we're going to cut it from this end and we'll mark it with a pencil real quick we can use these scrap pieces that were cutting off for our other projects and for the back of this trap as well okay now we're ready to get our top glued and nailed and then we can figure out the back of the trap as far as the pieces we have to put together to make the back and then we'll start on the trigger system alright so basically we've cut two pieces they're just going to butt up against each other here for the back just like this okay so now you basically have the makings of a live box trap now we just have to figure out the trigger system and that's pretty simple what we're going to do is we're going to notch this stick so that's just down inside this box and the notch will sit up inside here so that when it's dislodged this will Teeter and drop this door okay so now we can cut some length off this door we made a little bit longer on purpose once we figure out the length of this because this has to travel far enough up when it pulls to drop the door down okay so we've cut a saw kerf here again remember it's going to sit like this so we're going to carve it out right there so we can just use any pocket knife or Whittle a knife we've got for that I'm going to use my Mora here and I'm going to carve that notch down this direction from my first mark into that stop cut that I just created just like that and I can just push it with my thumb to get rid of that material just like that cut it right down to it and then stop okay you want to be about halfway through the material and about no more right there okay so looking inside our trap your trigger stick goes just like this you can see it down inside the trap and if I pick it up it's going to pull up on the trap because it's lodged as soon as something bumps into that stick it's going to dislodge and come out of this hole and that's what we want okay so this part of it takes just a little bit of tweaking on your part I cut two inches off of this door because I know it has to be raised almost all the way up it's got to be pretty even with this so that when this comes up this goes down just like this okay so these two need to be fairly even so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to come in here and I'm going to tack a fence nail right into the top of this door pretty much dead center and I'm just eyeballing that okay now all I'm doing with this top of this trigger stick is I'm kind of notch it out just giving myself a little bit of a knob on the end of that thing now we can start to kind of test things out and measure things okay so now I've taken a piece of wire and got it the same length as it is from the door where I'd tap that fence nail in so we made that indention in our trigger here all right and that will make it sit like this now what we need to do is we need to put a piece in here and we'll kind of have to figure out how tall that piece needs to be but it's basically just a resting Teeter and we'll make sure that it's on there permanently more done but we want to check the opening of our door to make sure it's we want so that when this trigger gets released the door falls that's the whole pretense of this trap all right now we've just taken a piece of wire and ran it through our staple at the top of the door and wrapped it around our trigger where we made our notch and the whole pretense of this trap or the old precedence of this trap is that you have bait in the back of the box and when the animal goes for the bait is going to be big enough that sooner or later is going to dislodge the trigger when he does that the door falls on the front of the trap and you have a live animal in a trap you don't really need to permanently connect any of this wire I would kind of leave it like it is so I've got some adjustment on things and I can pull it out to the front bend it a little bit if I need to or whatever because it doesn't hurt anything for it to fall free like that

the traps set off that's not hurting anything the animals still in there the only thing I would possibly do beyond what I've done here is maybe drill some air holes in there and things like that put a window in there possibly with a screen so I could see what kind of animal was in there but you're going to be able to see that a little bit through this hole in the top and you're also obviously going to know when you open the door but those are simple improvements that you can make to this trap but it's a very simple trap to make for a young man it's a good first project in making a trap box and it's very good way to catch animals alive it's really good for rabbits and squirrels and things like that so I wanted to show you guys that project as the first in our series today folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance after the Pathfinder school I appreciate you joining me today for this quick video on how to make a simple livebox trap I appreciate your views I appreciate your support I thank you everything you do for school for family for business all of our sponsors instructors affiliates and Friends and back to another video as soon as we can thanks guys